Recently, I was seriously puzzled by an attack from an anonymous (of course) ‘academic’ (female) on another forum that branded the contents of this site as ‘seething with testosterone’. Well, you make of that what you will, but it reminded me of an incident back when I first attempted my doctoral thesis on Ballard, some 12 years ago. I vividly recall delivering a paper at a postgrad seminar and being roundly attacked during question time by a woman who was disgusted by my support of such a ‘deeply misogynistic writer’. I remember replying that in Ballard, it’s actually the male characters that have a pretty hard time of it, and if anything their flaws are more magnified and on display, thus supporting my interrogator’s sense of outrage about male attitudes in a roundabout way if she could only bring herself to see it thus.

Related to this, there was something else going on about Ballard’s female characters, something to do with male inadequacy in the wake of female intelligence, that I couldn’t quite articulate at the time but which Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum has perhaps nailed, in this recent interview over at Deep Glamour:

DG: Who are the most glamorous characters in science fiction?

JMcN: J. G. Ballard’s female characters are straight out of film noir, except a million times smarter. The only thing he obsesses over more than airports and drained swimming pools is feminine intellect. He barely describes their appearance, but instead gives them high-power jobs, introverted tendencies, and sharp wit. They are doctors, never nurses. They are usually thinking one step ahead of the male protagonist. He recognizes that intellectual curiosity and femininity aren’t contradictory. I mean, this is a man who confessed to a crush on Hillary Clinton in a recent interview. Susan Sontag so much adored his books she briefly planned to script and direct The Crystal World with Jean Seberg in a starring role.

Rosanna Arquette and Holly Hunter are two of my favorite actresses, but it was Deborah Unger who epitomized “Ballardian” for me in Crash. She was so perplexingly remote and intelligent. She’s not a bitch, but she’s not quirky, rarely smiles, and has a tentative way of interacting with other people. Unger’s mother is a nuclear scientist and she studied economics and philosophy in college. So she really is that Ballardian ideal analytic woman. That she’s as beautiful as she is makes it all the more disarming.

ABOVE: Photo by Steven Meisel.

ABOVE: Photo by Kohei Yoshiyuki.

Via Susannah Breslin (Boing Boing guest blogger), we learn that Ballardian favourite Steven Meisel is back with ‘a layout that was (supposedly) too hot to run in Vogue Italy, so we get to look at them on the internets. NSFW, unless you work in an orgy pit’. Writes Susannah, the shots were ‘inspired by … old school Kodak infrared flashbulb illuminated snaps of Japanese sexhibitionists and their peeping toms in parks that were shot by Kohei Yoshiyuki in the early ’70s’. Evidently, Meisel is updating Yoshiyuki for a dogging generation.

But what’s the deal with NY Mag trading on the perv value of Meisel’s rejection by Vogue, only to reproduce the pictures at such a small size?

In any case, it’s not as NSFW as this.

..:: Previously on Ballardian

+ Triple Transgression
+ Love Among the Mannequins
+ This Time It’s War!
+ Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency
+ JGB’s Sinister Marriage
+ Dead Models

By day the overflights of B-52s crossed the drowned causeways of the delta, unique ciphers of violence and desire.

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition.

ABOVE: MotoArt’s B-707 Fuselage Room Divider.

Chris Nakashima-Brown emails to tell me about MotoArt, which produces SMOKING HOT furniture made from aviation parts. As Chris says: ‘The perfect extra touch for the Ballardian bachelor pad…’

I want the B-52 Office Ejection Seat … and the F-4 Phantom Coffee Table … Oh and the … oh, oh … ahhhh…

I think Troy Paiva might also be interested.

More info: MotoArt.

ABOVE: MotoArt’s F-4 Phantom Coffee Table.

ABOVE: MotoArt’s B-52 Ejector Office Chair.

From outer space to inner…
LEFT: Gabrielle Drake in UFO. RIGHT: Ms Drake in Crash!.

Pringle: [In Crash!] you were playing opposite a professional actress, so it wasn’t as though it was purely a documentary.

Ballard: Yes, that was… oh, what was the name of the actress? A rather pretty actress, I suppose she’s now in her 50s. Gabrielle Drake! She briefly appeared as a mysterious woman that I drove around with. It was fun.

David Pringle, “The SFX Interview with J. G. Ballard”, 1996.

The film was based on my interest in the car crash — as it emerged through the pages of The Atrocity Exhibition. It was made in the early 70s. With Gabrielle Drake. She was quite a serious actress in her early days, but then she moved off into Crossroads or something. She was very sweet. I met her a few times on the set, as it were, chasing around multi-storey car-parks in Watford.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Iain Sinclair in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

At the terminal risk of coming on like a refugee from io9, this post is in honour of the actor Gabrielle Drake, the most beautiful and stylish woman to ever appear in SF film or TV. How could so many American boys waste their sci-fi wet dreams on Carrie Fisher in Star Wars, especially given that Ms Drake, playing Lt. Gay Ellis in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO TV series, had much, much cooler hair and clothes than Princess Leia. Give me Gay’s sexy purple wig and slinky silver spandex catsuit over Leia’s ridiculous side-buns and risible toga-cum-kimono any day of the week.

As for technical ability, well, Ms Drake is a well-respected Shakespearean actress! But if that doesn’t impress, consider that in the role of Lt. Ellis she was required to not only portray a character who lacks confidence but to also invest that character with a determination to overcome her self-doubt and rebirth herself as a dynamic officer type. Plus she convincingly portrayed unrequited love for a fellow officer, unrequited love being a difficult task for any actor and a far cry from Leia’s cartoonish are-they-or-aren’t-they “bromance” with that pansy Luke Skywalker. Also, any glance at UFO can tell you that Ms Drake’s eyes say so much, a riot of organic semiology fluttering beneath the candy, subtlety beyond compare.

Ms Drake also had the enormous good taste, the good sense, during the UFO era (1970-71) to work with none other than the Sage of Shepperton himself, starring opposite JGB in Harley Cokliss’s short film, Crash! (1971). She performs admirably, playing the very first Ballardian woman-catalyst on film, beautiful but utterly doomed, stripped of identity in the face of an encroaching technological landscape, her coquettish sexuality reduced to literally nothing more than a hood ornament: Ms Drake makes us believe it all in Crash!. I very much doubt that Ms Fisher would be able to switch from space opera to inner space with such ease, skill and grace. And as for Ms Drake vs. either Rosanna Arquette or Holly Hunter in the other Crash, the Cronenberg version, well again there really is no contest, is there? It’s got to be Gabrielle all the way down the line, and then some. (Weiss’s cypher-woman looked the part but she clearly couldn’t act).

Ballard and Gabrielle Drake, sister of the mythologised singer/songwriter Nick Drake. Colonials all. Ex-pats, with memories of tropical splendour, marooned among the concrete atolls of Watford. The Drakes had grown up in Burma. Gabrielle’s parents had been evacuated from Rangoon to India when the Japanese invaded. She recalls her father composing “an entire comic operetta about an Englishman who was based out East”. (Ballard, paying his respects to the earlier film, used the name Gabrielle for the character in Crash who would be played by Rosanna Arquette.)

Iain Sinclair, David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

To further demonstrate Ms Drake’s versatility in that magical year of 1971, I have interpolated stills of her in the UFO series with screengrabs of her in Crash!. There are also YouTube clips of both works towards the end. And I must thank The Diary of a Mad Natural Historian for alerting me to the existence of Gabrielle on Flickr, from which the stills were lifted. For more, visit Poletti’s “The Ladies of UFO” set.

NOTE: See the Noise blog for a warm interview with Ms Drake, in which she remembers her brother and his music.

SIX DEGREES OF J.G. BALLARD: Ms Drake is connected to JGB in other ways. In 1970 Ballard received his first screen credit (misspelled as “J.B. Ballard”), providing the story for Val Guest’s prehistoric potboiler, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 1972, just one year after UFO and Crash!, Guest directed Au Pair Girls, starring none other than Ms Drake, who appeared, gulp, naked as the day she was born.

1971: YEAR OF THE DRAKE

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

YOUTUBE

ABOVE: a clip from UFO, featuring Ms Drake dubbed into German.

ABOVE: Crash! by Harley Cokliss, starring Ms Drake.

ABOVE: opening sequence of UFO.

ABOVE: a montage of clips from UFO.

+ From Joanne:

You might want to take a look at the newest issue of Modern Painters (Feb 08.) There is an article about writers that inspire visual artists, and Ballard is mentioned several times. (“The reception of literature in the art world is partly a matter of adjectives: today any work that raises the topic of technology and catastrophe, for example, is automatically Ballardian.”)

Very intriguing. I’ll be expanding on the points raised in this article some time soon.

+ From Simon:

Drained swimming pools!

+ From melb psy:

I wondered if you’d seen this [girl films her attempted murder of her parents].

rather ‘Running Wild’….

+ From John:

Ran across this, ‘abandoned wonders of the former Soviet Union’, and thought it would interest you (if you haven’t already seen it).

+ From Alan:

I thought you might find this of some interest/use! Tis a pity it’s too late for your site, but they have, if you’ll excuse the pun, more in the pipeline!!! Great site by the way.

Toilet duct and other diminutive issues
January 23rd, 2008

Resonance FM’s Amenity Space is the only regular series on British radio dedicated to architecture, in this week’s edition Nicky Kirk and Tony Broomhead examine the acoustic spaces of toilets, ventilation shafts and other utilitarian spaces in some of London’s most well known public spaces. In next week’s edition Kirk and Broomhead discuss micro-architecture and look at some of the smallest projects making the biggest headlines in a show that will no doubt be of gargantuan quality.

Amenity Space broadcasts every Thursday between 1 and 2pm.

+ From Andy:

I linked your site from an article I did for Shanghaiist.com [about Rick McGrath's recent trip to Ballard's old home in Shanghai]. It’s only a digest style post but just letting you know all the same.

+ From Anonymous:

Ballard-related exhibition in Barcelona.

Note: I will be writing more about this when the time comes, ie, June/July this year; I’ve already written something about the event, speculating on the shape of it, some time ago.

+ From Darin:

I write to offer you a link to the current issue of an e-zine I edit. While not specifically “Ballardian,” the latest issue, “Dietrologia” of Farrago’s Wainscot features fiction that touches on themes that I think you might find worthwhile. I first heard of your site when you reviewed/blurbed the first issue of Diet Soap, in which my story “The Basement, Borges” appeared.

Urls: http://www.farragoswainscot.com
[current issue]: http://www.farragoswainscot.com/current.html

+ From Greg:

Extreme Ballardian tourism — The Island of Prora:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora
http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=563
http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/10_5/rostock15.htm

Did Hitler invent mass tourism…?

+ From JD:

Hi, not sure whether this would interest you, but a guy called Paul Torrens has a project for modeling urban panic.

Some quotes . . .

“the project will develop simulations to explore avenues of sustainability in downtown settings, such as how cities can promote walking as an alternative to driving, and how pedestrian flow can be better integrated with transit-oriented development.”

“4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death;5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d’état — regime change through landscape architecture.”

Link:
http://pruned.blogspot.com/2007/06/modeling-urban-panic.html

P.S. Loving Ballardian.com BTW.

+ From Mr. Nobody:

Sex Offenders Set Up Camp

+ From Joe:

Simon, there’s a terrific video of JGB at home giving a kind of ‘greatest hits’ performance for the Italian publishers of Millenium People. I don’t think you have a link to it on the website, if you’re interested it can be found here.

Keep up the fine work, Ballardian.com is truly the website the great man deserves.

+ From Anonymous:

Greetings, Mr Sellars

If I may, Phantom Shanghai, an exquisite book of photography by Greg Girard. China’s hyper-economy is eerily represented by a ravenous building boom which is literally devouring all traces of the old. These new buildings loom threatening over what little is left, as if deliberating upon their next move towards total domination. William Gibson offers a brief introduction.

An interview with Girard is here.

Love The Ballardian!

+ From electric:

Black Friday Die Die Die: America’s most obscene shopping day meets its doom in an oily nightmare hell. All true!

+ From Peter:

Something from Ballard’s “The Subliminal Man” has begun to come true.

+ From Thomas:

cockroaches–first creatures conceived and born in space

+ From Mark:

Audi TT, and a model, in a swimming pool for a fashion photo shoot

Like the car wash scene from Crash, but wetter.

+ From Henry:

‘Letter bomber who bore a grudge’: The fightback begins.

From unnamed Dsquared2 campaign, by Steven Meisel.

Love among the Mannequins. Unable to move, he lay on his back, feeling the sharp corner of the novel cut into his ribs. Her hand rested across his chest, nails holding the hair between his nipples like a lover’s scalp brought back for him as a trophy. He looked at her body. Humped against his right shoulder, her breasts formed a pair of deformed globes like the elements of a Bellmer sculpture. Perhaps an obscene version of her body would form a more significant geometry, an anatomy of triggers? In his eye, without thinking, he married her right knee and left breast, ankle and perineum, armpit and buttock. Carefully, to avoid waking her, he eased his arm from beneath her head. Through the apartment window the opalescent screen of the open-air cinema rose above the rooftops. Immense fragments of Bardot’s magnified body illuminated the night air.

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Summer Cannibals’, from The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

John C. informs me of a campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. As John says, it’s ‘the usual “god, we need a new thrill” stuff from the fashion industry but it’s difficult not to see this as Crash-inspired.’

Click on ‘Campaign’: this Dsquared2 campaign doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling?

From ‘State of Emergency’, by Steven Meisel.

The photographer is none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel, who has featured on Ballardian.com thrice before: here, here and here. One thing I like about Meisel is that he seems to be slyly sending up the fashion industry each time. In the ‘State of Emergency’ shoot, I rather fancy reading into it an account of the fashion industry declaring war on the anorexic models that have tainted it, all the better to introduce something even more robotic and inhuman. In this crash-test campaign, I am imagining similarities with Paul Verhoeven’s approach to Starship Troopers: casting beefcake and catwalk queens, oiling them up and fetishing them…then decapitating them with extreme prejudice.

Well, maybe not quite — no one beats Verhoeven for sheer creative cynicism — but there is a certain tension at play in Meisel…maybe. Or is there?

Or have am I just become another fashion victim, swallowing Meisel’s bling-orgy aesthetic hook, line and sinker and trying to justify it to the artless masses?

From ‘Make Love, not War’ by Steven Meisel.

What’s certain, though, is that nothing has quite pushed the envelope like the ‘dead girls’ shoot from America’s Top Model, and I still can’t make up my mind about that one…

I must away and consult The Atrocity Exhibition at great length, as it’s been a while since I read it.

I have a feeling it holds the key to everything.

Image from America’s Next Top Model.

Two readers, Alf & Peter, wrote in separately with news of ‘Accident: A New Fragrance for Women’.

As the punchline says: ‘Accident. New fragrance for women. Fragrance strip: The unique fusion of burnt rubber, brake fluid and excrement. If you don’t want to experience it again, don’t drive and call.’

As Alf says, it’s ‘crypto-Ballardian’, yes. Very Crash. Even after it turns out this is (or was?) a viral marketing campaign from T-Mobile, warning against the dangers of driving while talking on the phone. A campaign I endorse, by the way. Many is the time, as a cyclist, I’ve almost been cleaned up by a car swerving in and out of the lane, a mobile phone glued to its driver’s ear.

Speed and violence is automatically linked with Ballard these days, like shorthand. The car as prosthesis. But in a sense Ballard’s real concern is inside the body, not the exoskeleton, and the ‘scenarios of nerves and blood vessels’ that lay buried under layers of cultural conditioning. Like Cronenberg, I’m sure Ballard would love to judge a beauty contest for the inside of the body, ranking intestines, arteries and internal organs rather than breasts, hips and face.

This was certainly a theme in some of Ballard’s earlier, experimental short stories, less explicit in his later work, although in a recent exhumation of Cocaine Nights I was struck by this passage:

I had never seen Frank make love, but I guessed that he had kissed Paula’s hips and navel as I did, running my tongue around its knotted crater with its scent of oysters, as if she had come to me naked from the sea. … I pressed my cheeks to her pubis, inhaling the same heady scent that Frank had drawn through his nostrils, parting the silky labia that he had touched a hundred times.

However briefly I had known Paula, my brother’s months of intimacy with her body seemed to welcome me to her, urging me on as I caressed her vulva and felt the scent glands around her anus. I kissed her knees, and then drew her to the bed, pressing my tongue to her armpits and tasting the sweet gullies with their soft underdown. Feeling not only lust but an almost fraternal affection for her, my imagined memories of her embracing Frank, I held her to my chest.
…
Taking my penis in one hand, she began to masturbate herself, eyes fixed on my still-leaking glans, forefinger parting her labia.
… ‘Paula, why can’t I stroke you?’

‘Later. It’s my Pandora’s box. Open it and all the ills of Dr Hamilton might escape.’

‘Ills…? Are there any? I bet Frank didn’t believe that.’ I took her palm and held her fingers to my nose, inhaling the rose-damp scent of her vulva. ‘For the first time I really envy him.’
…
She raised one knee, watching the shadows of the plastic blind wrap themselves around her thigh. ‘It looks like a bar code. How much am I worth?’

‘A lot, Paula. More than you think. Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.’

‘Being hyper-realistic about everything’, a modern-day sin if ever there was one…

Similarly, like the narrator, Charles, in the above passage, the character Laing in High-Rise allows himself to be guided by bodily odour, seeing it as a pure expression of his new state of being, stripped of his technological exoskeleton after life in the high-rise has broken down into tribal chaos:

Within ten minutes he had returned to his apartment. After bolting the door, he climbed over his barricade and wandered around the half-empty rooms. As he inhaled the stale air he was refreshed by his own odour, almost recognizing parts of his body — his feet and genitalia, the medley of smells that issued from his mouth. He stripped off his clothes in the bedroom, throwing his suit and tie into the bottom of the closet and putting on again his grimy sports-shirt and trousers. He knew now that he would never again try to leave the high-rise. He was thinking about Alice, and how he could bring her to his apartment. In some way these powerful odours were beacons that would draw her to him.

So, with all this in mind, I reckon there’s a new fragrance that is perhaps even more Ballardian than ‘Accident’. I have no idea if it’s a real product or not but who cares? It’s hilarious. And it would definitely appeal to Charles, with his passion for the scent glands of his lover’s anus and especially the ‘rose-damp scent of her vulva’.

It’s a fragrance that is actually called ‘Vulva’, and you must watch the promotional video — it simply has to be seen to be believed. Aside from what I’ve just mentioned, it’s explicitly Ballardian in the way it talks of ‘fiction becoming reality’ and the vaginal scent of the perfume setting off the ‘film inside your head’.

The erotic, intimate scent of a beautiful woman… The precious vaginal odour filled into a small glass phial. The phial is shaken gently, only a tiny amount of the precious, organic substance is applied onto the back of the hand, and the irresistible smell that exudes from a sensuous vagina immediately intensifies your erotic fantasies and starts the film rolling inside your head. VULVA Original is not a perfume. It is a beguiling vaginal scent which is purely a substitute for your own smelling pleasure.

Wonderful. So what do you think? ‘Accident’ or ‘Vulva’ as a gift for that special someone in your life?

UPDATE: John Coulthart informs us that while “VULVA may be a joke the recent ads for a fragrance from clothing designer Tom Ford are quite real.”

Steve O. sent me a link to a photo shoot for America’s Next Top Model, on the subject of dead girls. It’s from March earlier this year, and even though seven months in the Ballardosphere is a very very long time, it still needs to be recorded. Steve writes, ‘I don’t know if this has crossed your radar yet, but it struck me as all very Atrocity Exhibition‘.

The judges’ comments have to be seen to be believed. For the above photo, we have this:

Felicia: Decapitated by a Model

Twiggy: I think she’s very beautiful. I don’t like this photograph this week.

Miss J: You’re so used to moving, that when you’re dead, you’re just that: capital D-E-A-D, dead.

Nigel: All the other girls managed to have some sort of spark even in this sort of morbid situation. I think I look at you in this picture, and you actually just look dead. One of the simplest things, like acting dead, can be the most challenging. The problem is that you didn’t do anything. You just gave up and thought that that was being dead.

Meanwhile, here’s a dissenting voice:

Jennifer L Pozner, from Women in Media and News:

Ain’t nothin’ hotter than a dead girl. That’s the take-away message from this week’s episode of America’s Next Top Model, in which Tyra “I care so much about my girls” Banks & co. created the most brazen bit of ad-industry misogyny ever to grace the reality TV genre: an entire episode presenting a gaggle of underfed model wannabes as the mutilated, mangled and murdered epitome of beauty.

I’m so disgusted by the photos that I refuse to give them extra visual traction on this blog… The lithe lot of ‘em are arrayed in awkward, broken poses, splayed out in cold concrete corridors, lifeless limbs positioned bloodily, just so, at the bottom of staircases, bathtubs and back alleys, mimicking their demise via stabbing, shooting, electrocution, drowning, poisoning, strangulation, decapitation and organ theft (!), to judges’ comments of “Gorgeous!” “Fantastic!” “Amazing!” “Absolutely beautiful!” and, of my favorite, “Death becomes you, young lady!”

For decades, media critics such as pioneering advertising theorist Jean Kilbourne have argued that ad imagery equating gruesome violence against women with beauty and glamour works to dehumanize women, making such acts in real life not only more palatable and less shocking, but even aspirational. ANTM’s pretty-as-a-picture crime-scene challenge epitomized the worst of an insidious industry trend that, ahem, just won’t die.
…
This is deeply dangerous to our culture, as I wrote in Bitchmagazine:

Advertising is profoundly manipulative at its core. Its imagery strives to deprive us of realistic ideas about love, beauty, health, money, work, childhood, and more in an attempt to convince us that only products can bring us true joy; numerous studies show that the more ads we view, the worse we feel about ourselves. How much worse will this psychological exploitation become when woven directly into our narratives?

+ Previously on Ballardian: k-punk on Steven Meisel.

The shop mannequin and the crash-test dummy have always held a privileged place in Ballard’s fiction. Battered, broken and discarded, they housed the streaky veins of alienation and despair that marked The Atrocity Exhibition. Rendered with Ballard’s clinical, amoral gaze, they evoked the terminal stylisation wreaked by technology in Crash. Fused by nuclear radiation into a solid, molten slag heap, they formed one of the most potent symbols of postwar anomie in ‘The Terminal Beach’. Trussed in bizarre orthopaedic harnesses, they signalled the insidious posthumanism of the early 21st century in Super-Cannes.

So it was with keen interest that I read Brendan’s email, informing me that shoppers have gone on the rampage at a store called … ahem… Clockwork Orange in Northern Ireland. ‘Feverish shoppers ripped clothes off shop mannequins during a bargain store sale which ended in trouble and police being called,’ the report intoned. According to an employee, ‘It was completely primeval – it was like hunter-gatherers. Within half an hour of the store opening the windows had been ransacked by people coming in and ripping the clothes off the mannequins and just leaving the mannequins on the ground.’

I’d fancifully like to think that these shoppers are exacting revenge for all the failings of themselves that they see reflected, Ballard style, in the eerie melancholy of the shop mannequin. But maybe, as Brendan writes, there is something more bloodless at work: ‘It seems that the store’s sale idea, that the cost is determined by the time of purchase [if you were in by 5am, everything was 5 pounds], is itself part of a willful upending of rational economics. They brought it on themselves…..this riot was part of the sales service?’

By the way, that BBC headline, ‘Mannequins mauled in store wars’ — it may well be the very best headline since ‘headless body found in topless bar’ (or, for Australian readers, ‘Man bites Jana’s bum’).

‘Missing the point’: (detail, Livre de Poche edition, 1973; design: Atelier Pascal Vercken).

NOTE: This is an edited version of an essay published in Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture by Rick Poynor, Laurence King Publishing, 2006. First published in Eye no. 52, Summer 2004. Reproduced with permission.

J. G. BALLARD’S Crash tests the limits of the reader’s taste and sympathies in the most profound ways and it has always provoked strong reactions – positive and negative. British novelist Will Self has said, ‘I only have to look at a few paragraphs of Crash to feel I am in the presence of an extreme mind, a mind at the limits of dark imagination.’ He meant this as a commendation. Even Ballard sometimes seemed ambivalent. ‘How many people are there who’d want to read a book like Crash?’ he once asked. ‘Not many.’

Yet Crash, described by Ballard himself as a ‘psychopathic hymn’, did find a following. Over the years it has appeared in French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Finnish, and Japanese translations. It became a cult book, appealing to the kind of reader who also liked William Burroughs — the type of novel a post-punk rock band might enthuse about in the music press.

I read the hardback first edition of Crash as a teenager, soon after it came out. I was already a devotee of Ballard’s other books, but I loved Crash’s extremity, its sense of moral danger, its willingness to probe dark areas of the psyche, and the toxic beauty of its prose. Over the years I collected editions of the book, partly to see whether any publisher could ever visualise a piece of writing which is prepared to be, in Ballard’s words, ‘openly pornographic’ as a literary stratagem. On the whole, though, image-makers have been defeated by Crash. A book that ought to have inspired covers to match and reflect its status as an underground classic has often received visual treatments marked by incomprehension and evasion. I was curious to know how Ballard viewed this, as a writer with such a strong sense of the visual. He didn’t wish to be interviewed – reviewing the covers would, he suggested, be ‘rather too close to an autopsy on myself’ – but he was willing to make notes on some of them if I sent him photocopies.

LEFT: Crash’s first jacket, designed by Bill Botton (Jonathan Cape, 1973).
RIGHT: Chris Foss’s interpretation (Panther, 1975).

The first jacket, published by Jonathan Cape in 1973, shows a jutting gear stick, presumably intended to be phallic, in front of a towering three-dimensional titlepiece that occupies most of the cover. This still rankles with Ballard, who describes it as ‘monstrously bad, one of the worst book jackets ever – for sheer ugliness and crudity, impossible to beat’. Few of the Ballard hardback covers produced by Cape in the 1970s and early 1980s were any good. The first UK paperback edition of Crash, however, illustrated by science fiction artist Chris Foss, retains its power. ‘Superb, in many ways the best ever,’ notes Ballard. ‘Quasi-realistic, but in the right way, like a movie poster of the 1950s – brought into brilliant focus by that line – “A brutal, erotic novel”.’ Foss, an illustrator of The Joy of Sex (1972), treats the image as an opportunity for lurid, pulp-style exploitation. There is nothing quite like this scene in the book. The ruined car smoulders with menace, its twisted bonnet rising above the woman’s naked body like a predator’s gaping maw. This cover established the principle iconographic elements — woman and car — that feature in many interpretations of Crash.

LEFT: Fashionable flirtations (illustration: James Marsh; Triad, 1985).
RIGHT: ‘Too lipsticky; too neat’. (illustration: Larry Rostant; Flamingo, 1993).

In 1985, the novel was reissued as part of a new, oppressively black-bordered series with an illustration by James Marsh, showing a red-lipped Amazon at the wheel, clad in studded leather. This connected the book with emerging trends in fetish clothing and a fashionable flirtation with S&M, but it had nothing to do with Ballard’s vision. By 1993, the woman was reduced to a pair of pouting red lips framed by a shattered rear view mirror – it resembled the kind of airbrush illustration in vogue 20 years earlier. Ballard dismisses the cover as ‘too lipsticky – too “neat”.’

LEFT: Livre de Poche again, for your pleasure… (1973; design: Atelier Pascal Vercken).

Ballard’s 1974 introduction, which might have offered additional clues for visual interpretation, is reprinted in both editions. Crash, he writes, is ‘an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. . . . Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our psychopathologies?’ Neither cover shows any hint of these concerns. The tacky Livre de Poche edition, in which a car’s radiator grille metamorphoses into a flesh-licking tongue, once again turns the vehicle itself into the protagonist and misses the point.

Where interpretations of Crash by male image-makers tend to present female sexual personae in the most obvious and unrevealing ways, as victim or vamp, missing the unbridled perversity of the book’s female characters, women designers and image-makers have been inclined to neutralise the book’s violent eroticism.

LEFT: Crash in the desert (design: Carin Goldberg; Vintage, 1985).
RIGHT: Ecstasy in the fairground (photograph: Clare Godfrey; Vintage, 1995).

A 1985 US paperback, designed by Carin Goldberg, with wide-spaced ‘new wave’ typography, arbitrarily transplants Crash to the American desert, where a faceless female who looks like a misplaced fashion model wanders away from some totemic car parts scattered in the dust. The cover’s Surrealism-lite bears only the most tenuous connection to the novel. Photographer Clare Godfrey’s cover image for the 1995 UK edition treats Crash as a kind of ecstatic fairground ride. The hot neon colours and chaotic superimpositions relate to a scene in which Vaughan and the narrator cruise the expressways while under the influence of LSD, but the image is strangely depopulated and Crash’s relentless sexual content is suppressed.

Crash is peculiarly resistant to attempts to summarise it with a single image. Its synthetic literary method depends on the conjunction within a verbal image of phenomena that are usually discrete. Ballard insistently establishes geometrical relationships between the body parts and postures of his characters and the technology that surrounds them: ‘By entering her vagina among the metal cabinets and white cables of the X-ray department I would somehow conjure back her husband from the dead, from the conjunction of her left armpit and the chromium camera stand, from the marriage of our genitalia and the elegantly tooled lens shroud.’ In the late 1980s, collage and montage became increasingly prevalent means of expressing thematic complexity on book covers. If ever a novel called out for a mode of evocation based on fragments and juxtaposition, it was Crash, but it was 1994 before an American design team explored this possibility.

‘Both sexes, equally implicated’ (detail, Noonday Press edition, 1994; design: Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden).

Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden’s cover for Noonday Press makes Crash look like the cult novel that it is. ‘I loved the book,’ says Kaye. ‘It was so much about cars and sex that it seemed stupid to hide that. We went to a junkyard. We were both really into this project.’ Hayden’s boyfriend was also involved in the shoot and, for once, both sexes are presented as equally implicated in Ballard’s nightmare marriage of technology and desire. It was Hayden’s photographic concept, but at the junkyard they passed around a Polaroid. The grid of 12 pictures on the cover shows smashed and crumpled bodywork, a hand clutching a roll of film, a man’s jeans open at the fly with the suggestion of an erection and a woman’s hand delving for her crotch. A glimpse of breasts or buttocks can be seen through a broken windshield. ‘They all represent little blips of the experience,’ says Kaye. ‘Using the grid speaks a little more to the futuristic quality without being so literal. It was about lots of little ideas making up the whole.’ The ‘garage font’ title typeface, a sans serif to which serifs have been applied selectively, adds to the mood of unease. With cult-like understatement, Kaye positions the title in the bottom right-hand corner as a kind of full point to the design.

Ballard had never seen this version of Crash until I sent it to him. Publishers do not always provide authors with copies of foreign editions. He found the cinematic treatment ‘a bit too literal – if the novel is a psychotic hymn, this hardly suggests it’. But then no cover has succeeded in fully expressing the delirium of Crash.

LEFT: Another miss (Vintage, 1996; cover photography © Alliance).

The 1996 UK film tie-in version, which Ballard, a supporter of Cronenberg’s interpretation, does admire, was another missed opportunity. The cover is based on a scene showing actress Holly Hunter (Helen Remington) straddling James Spader (James Ballard) in the front seat of a car. While the image conveys nothing of the perversity of either book or film and only hints at the role of the car, it does carry an erotic charge, acknowledging sexual interaction as the book’s subject in a way that few Crash covers have dared.

The cautious handling of Crash, even now, is all the more surprising when one considers the prevalence of pornographic imagery in contemporary culture. As a work of bizarre prophecy, the book was far enough ahead of its time to be truly shocking, though only a fool would imagine that Ballard thought we should crash our cars for sexual thrills. The phenomenon and meaning of the collision has become the subject of cultural criticism in essay collections such as Car Crash Culture (2001) and Crash Cultures (2003), and the spectre of Ballard’s narrative invariably haunts their pages. Crash’s explosive collisions of flesh and metal are, as Ballard says, a metaphor, taking social tendencies and following their trajectories to discover where they might lead. In his introduction, he notes that ‘we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly’. If that was true in 1973, it is even more the case today. At the time, Ballard described the book as ‘cautionary’ and ‘a warning’, but he has wavered on the question of whether Crash is a moral indictment. In 1997, he told cultural critic Mark Dery that the novel illustrates the process by which ‘formerly aberrant or psychopathic behavior is annexed into the area of the acceptable’ and he pointed out how the proliferation of new communications technologies was aiding this process.

In December 2003, GQ ran a story about ‘dogging’, a sexual subculture in which people use the Internet to arrange meetings where they have sex in parked cars while others watch. The item was illustrated by the Hunter and Spader shot used on the cover of Crash.

Rick Poynor

..:: MORE CRASH COVERS FROM RICK POYNOR’S COLLECTION

Above…
LEFT: Bruna Dutch edition (1980; design: Kothuis Art-Team).
RIGHT: Minotauro Spanish edition (1980; design uncredited).

Above…
LEFT: 10/18 French edition (1992; detail from Roy Lichtenstein’s Woman in bath).
RIGHT: Noonday Press US edition (1994; design: Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden).

Above…
LEFT: Picador USA edition (2000; design: Henry Sene Yee; painting: Davin Watne).
RIGHT: Vintage Blue UK edition (2004; photograph Scott Wishart; designer uncredited).

Rick Poynor was founding editor of Eye magazine in London from 1990 to 1997. He writes columns for Eye and for Print magazine in New York, and he has covered design, media and visual culture for Blueprint, Frieze, I.D., Icon, Domus, Metropolis, Adbusters, Harvard Design Magazine, The Guardian, Financial Times, and many other publications. His books include No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (2003) and the essay collections Design Without Boundaries (1998), Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001) and Designing Pornotopia (2006). In 2003, he co-founded www.designobserver.com, now a leading weblog for design discussion. He is a research fellow at the Royal College of Art in London, and he lectures widely in Europe, the US, Australia and China.

..:: MORE INFO
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard Cover Art
+ Rick McGrath’s Terminal Collection
+ Ballardia: Jeremy Dennis’s JGB Cover Art Gallery
+ Mike Holliday’s guide to collecting Ballard

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

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

..:: Simon

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

How did you become interested in Ballard’s writing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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J.G. Ballard. ‘Interview by A. Juno & Vale’. RE/Search: J.G. Ballard (1984).
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You’re known for your huge collection of Ballard first editions, flying in the face of Ballard’s attitude towards archivists and collectors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your favourite of all Ballard covers?

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

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

There are two…

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

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

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

OK, I’m a few days late with this, but I just wanted to acknowledge my Super Snout, FJ Torres, who alerted me last week to the presence of Peter Lindbergh’s Future of Fashion spread in this month’s Harper’s Bazaar (FJ previously tipped me off about Steven Meisel’s Terror Porn antics).

Ballard once wrote that “sex times technology equals the future”, and this spread builds an entire world using that formula: Lindbergh distils a nostalgia for a retro-future that never was (apparently all the rage right now), sprinkling it like stardust over these photos, forever delaying orgasm in an imminence that never arrives, man, machine and starlet collapsed into the eternal present.

The dream is forever out of reach: to “unlock the door, embrace the flames, lie down with this beast in a world beyond time”…

FJ: “This picture in particular is just TOO much. Like a still from a film version of ‘Memories of the Space Age’…”

She was intent now only on the search for her father, confident that he would soon be returning from the tideways of space. At night the trajectories were ever lower, tracks of charged particles that soared across the forest. She had almost ceased to eat, and Mallory was glad that once her father arrived she would at last give up her flying. Then the two of them would leave together”.

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J.G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
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…:: LINKS
+ Peter Lindbergh’s Future of Fashion spread

‘Obscene mannequins’. ‘Conceptual deaths’. The eroticisation of violence in the media landscape… the stunning ‘State of Emergency’ spread in the current Vogue Italia seems to come straight out of JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition…

A few weeks ago, I asked whether it would be possible ‘for there to be a pornography, sponsored by Dior or Chanel, scripted by a latter-day Masoch or Ballard, whose fantasies were as artfully staged as the most glamorous fashion photo shoot?’ Steven Meisel’s Vogue photo-shoot, much more than Mike Figgis’s drearily vanilla promotional films for Agent Provocateur, suggests that such a pornography is conceivable.

‘State of Emergency’ shows, once again, that it is left to high fashion to take up the role that fine art has all but abandoned. While much of fine art has succumbed to the ‘passion for the real’, high fashion remains the last redoubt of Appearance and Fantasy.

The used tampons and pickled animals of Reality Art offer, at best, tracings of the empirical. Their quaint biographism reveals nothing of the unconscious. Meisel’s elegantly-staged photographs, meanwhile, drip with an ambivalence worthy of the best Surrealist paintings. They are uncomfortable and arousing in equal measure because they reflect back to us our conflicted attitudes and unacknowledged libidinal complicities. (In this respect, they form a sharp contrast with the infinitely more exploitative image being used to front the American Express Red campaign, whose meaning is easily anchored to the co-ordinates of the currently dominant ideological constellation.)

Reframed as Art, the Vogue photographs would no doubt be described — in the all-too familiar terms of art-critical muzak — as ‘negotiating with ideas of violence/ terror/ etc.’ As high fashion, they meet instead with a type of liberal denunciation that is no less familiar. In the Guardian, Joanna Bourke complained that, ‘It is no coincidence that the security forces are shown to be protecting us from a person who is neither male nor obviously Muslim’. Would Bourke have preferred it, then, if the images did feature a Muslim man?

Bourke continues:

Instead, the terrorist threat is an unreal woman. In contrast to the security personnel depicted, she is placed beyond the realm of the human. Her skin is as plastic as a mannequin’s; her body is too perfect, even when grimacing in pain. When the model is depicted as the aggressor, she remains nothing more than the phallic dominatrix of many adolescent boys’ wet dreams. In both instances, the beauty of the photographs transforms acts of violence and humiliation into erotic possibilities.

Again, what would Bourke have preferred: simulated snuff in which ‘real-looking’ women were roughed up by security staff? Bourke’s hostility to the fantasmatic is oddly doubled by the aggression of the security personnel towards the ‘unreal’ women. And what does it mean to substitute an ‘unreal woman’ for an all-too-real Muslim male, in any case? What does the confusion of ontological levels — agents of reality conjoined with the waxy artificiality of Bellmer-doll fashion models — tell us? The photographs are fascinating and unsettling because there are no straightforward answers to these questions.

Needless to say, Meisel’s photographs do find erotic possibilities in violence and humiliation, but this is not so much a ‘transformation’ as a rediscovery. Two hundred years after Sade, a century after Bataille and Masoch, it appears that anything which publicly acknowledges that eroticism is inseparable from violence and humiliation is more unacceptable than ever. The issue is not how ‘healthy’ sexuality can be purged of violence, but how the violence inherent to sexuality can be sublimated. Meisel’s photographs — which, we should remember, appear in a magazine the vast majority of whose readership is not ‘adolescent males’ but women — are ‘fantasy kits’ which offer just such sublimations, providing scenarios, role-play cues and potential fantasmatic identifications.

‘State of Emergency’ demonstrates that, rather than simply retaining its capacity to shock, The Atrocity Exhibition is more disturbing than ever. The overt sexualisation and compulsory carnality of postmodern image culture distracts us from the essential staidness of its rendition of the erotic. As Baudrillard argues in Seduction, biologised sex functions as the reality principle of contemporary culture: everything is reducible to sex, and sex is just a matter of meat mechanics. Ours is an age of cynicism and piety, which, as Simon suggested in his initial post on ‘State of Emergency’, primly and pruriently resists the equivalences between eroticism, violence and celebrity that Ballard explored.

Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetised in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticising her punctured bronchus in the over-ventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds’.

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JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
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To imagine the atrocities of September 11th and Abu Ghraib mimetised in the alternate death of Paris Hilton feels far more unacceptable, because contemporary piety has sacralised its atrocities in a way that the 60s could not. In Atrocity, Dr Nathan’s reminder that, at the level of the unconscious, ‘the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam…may in fact play very different parts from the ones we assign them’ is extremely timely. (As Burroughs tells us in his preface to The Atrocity Exhibition, ‘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’.) It is clear that the appalling Abu Ghraib photographs were already intensely eroticised stagings whose scenarios were derived from cheap American pornography. Love and Napalm: Export USA, indeed*. Part of the reason that the Abu Ghraib images were so traumatic for a deeply conflicted American culture which combines religious moralism with hyper-sexualised commerce, and which is united only by a taste for megaviolence, is that they exposed the equation between military intervention and sexual humiliation that the official culture both depends upon and must suppress.

It’s interesting to compare both The Atrocity Exhibition and ‘State of Emergency’ to Martha Rosler’s series of collages, Bringing the War Home. ‘Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child’: this typical section from The Atrocity Exhibition could almost be a gloss on Rosler’s images, with their irruptions of war and atrocity amidst domestic scenes. But in Rosler’s case, unlike in Ballard’s, surrealist juxtaposition has a clear polemical purpose. The Atrocity Exhibition, like ‘State of Emergency’, is devoid of any decipherable intent; the oneiric juxtapositions in Ballard’s and Meisel’s work seemed to be conceived of as neutral re-presentations of the substitutions and elisions made by the mediatised unconscious.

Meisel’s fantasy kits, their narratives left implicit and mysterious, suggest ways in which Ballard might be adapted in future. Part of the problem with Weiss’s film adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition is that it subordinated the fragmentary mode of the novel to the duree — the lived time — of the feature film. The most successful part of the film was perhaps the first few moments, where Ballard’s text was intoned over still images in a style reminiscent of Marker’s La Jetee (a film which Ballard adores, of course). That is partly because it is the profound stillness of the Surrealist paintings which The Atrocity Exhibition describes and appropriates — their beaches drained of time — which sets the rhythm of the novel. The most successful adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition would, precisely, be an exhibition — not only of photographs, but also of newsreel footage, mandalas, diagrams, paintings and notebooks. It would be left for the viewer-participant to assemble their own narratives from these fantasy kits.

k-punk

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*Love and Napalm: Export USA — title of The Atrocity Exhibition’s original American edition
————————————————————————————————

..:: LINKS
+ Buy The Atrocity Exhibition from Amazon
+ State of Emergency: scans from the mag
+ k-punk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over at k-punk a few months back, Mark posted a radical thesis that positioned Basic Instinct 2 as the unofficial sequel to Cronenberg/Ballard’s Crash:

[Catherine] Tramell returns in the second film as a camp vamp whose persona owes more to Ballard than to film noir. Catherine is a name Ballard has often used, and Basic Instinct 2 sometimes feels that it is as much a sequel to Crash as to Verhoeven’s film. Setting the film in a phantasmatic, cybergothic London means, in fact, that Basic Instinct 2 recalls aspects of Ballard’s novel that Cronenberg’s film, with its North American setting, didn’t get to”.

Now, as part of an inter-weblog pornography symposium, k-punk writes:

Crash, of course, follows Masoch and Newton in delocalizing sex from genitality. Libido is invested in the mis-en-scene more than in the meat, which draws its attraction almost entirely from its adjacency to the decorous nonorganic – to clothes as much as cars. Clothes differentiate Glam’s cold and cruel cultivation of appearances from hardcore’s passion for the real. Without suits, dresses and shoes, without fur, leather and nylon, pornography might as well be arranging meat in a butcher’s window. Newton told Ballard that he ‘loved Cronenberg’s Crash, but one thing bothered him. ‘The dresses,’ he whispered. ‘They were so awful.” This strikes me as waspishly unfair to Denice Cronenberg’s elegant wardrobe selections. (One major problem with Jonathan Weiss’ version of The Atrocity Exhibition, however, is precisely the dreadfulness of the clothes.) Crash takes its cues from high fashion magazines, whose images are more sumptuously arty than fine art, more suffused with deviant eroticism than hardcore porn. Would it be impossible for there to be a pornography, sponsored by Dior or Chanel, scripted by a latter-day Masoch or Ballard, whose fantasies were as artfully staged as the most glamorous fashion photo shoot?”

It’s possible, of course, but it just wouldn’t sell.

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