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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Reed, Diamond Nebula.

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

Jeremy Reed speaking to Nicky Singer at the ICA.

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

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

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

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

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

the way 10 million atoms colonize
an inked full stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Reed – photograph courtesy Waterloo Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s out there somewhere, while the London rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Reed – photographer(s) unknown.

Thanks to Shane for help with research for this article.

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

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

review by Jamie Sherry

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 1 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Runtime: 18 mins
Voice: Ermanna Montanari
Sound: Davide Sandri
Music: Egle Sommacal
Editor: Benedetto Lanfranco
Photography: Alvise Renzini
Animation: Alvise Renzini
Script: Lucio Apolito (based on the short story ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ by J.G. Ballard)
Director: Alvise Renzini
Producer: Opificio Ciclope

NOTE: An English translation of the voiceover can be found here.

In discussion about his adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love (1984), the director Volker Schlöndorff famously remarked that ‘if I make a movie which Proustians celebrate for its fidelity, I will have failed as a director’. Predictably, the film was widely criticised for misrepresenting the source material and for perceived acts of violent reductionism. It was these issues that framed my viewing of the Italian animation Grande Anarca, based on my favourite Ballard short story, ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985). As a devotee of Ballard’s post-60s short stories, I was expecting to be underwhelmed by the film, regardless of my interest in the idea of adapting such an un-cinematic work of prose. The film ended up actually exceeding my expectations, deviating from the demands of a faithful adaptation, yet finding a life of its own amongst the wider architecture of the Ballardian.

The study of literature on film has largely liberated itself from the confines of the ‘fidelity debate’ and aesthetic judgements regarding how close the film is deemed to be to the ‘spirit of the book’. Cartmell and Whelehan’s Adaptations (1999), Stam and Raengo’s Literature and Film (2004) and Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), amongst others, have done much to progress the study of adaptation, a field that has privileged the status of literature over film. For too long film adaptations have been viewed as misrepresenting, reducing, despoiling and ultimately failing to capture an essential essence somehow contained in the source text. Film adaptations are judged by what they fail to do, or what they omit, rather than what they achieve, or add. Within an atheistic, post-structuralist view of adaptation, the novel does not contain a ‘spirit’, but is rather an intertextual assortment of many precursor texts that make up the bricolage landscape of culture. It is with this more open and democratic approach to adaptation that Grande Anarca should be approached, appreciating the intertextual methodology that has been employed in the adaptation process.

First published in Ambit 100 (Spring 1985), ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ is a fascinating, if unlikely, choice of source material for a film adaptation. Very much an understudied story, it sits alongside ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) and The Index (1977) as Ballard’s most experimental and playful self-contained short stories, whilst also sharing many of his central themes concerning madness and incarceration. Eventually published together in the compendium War Fever (1990), these stories mischievously subvert classical notions of structure, form and content, unifying Ballard’s playful deployment of paratexts as narrative medium. The French literary theorist Gérard Genette coined the neologism ‘paratext’ to describe subsidiary and secondary material such as prefaces, post-scripts, footnotes and illustrations, which illuminate, but are ultimately subservient to, the principle text. As Ballard himself noted in Paris Review (Winter,1984): ‘lists are fascinating; one could almost do a list novel’.

Ballard sets out to exploit these paratextual narrative devices to self-consciously confront the reader, and include us in an ironic discourse with the text. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown (not to be confused with the chapter of the same name in The Atrocity Exhibition) commences with a lone 18-word sentence; the rest of the story comprising eighteen footnotes cited from each word, the sentence savagely deconstructed by a mental asylum inmate into its constituent units. The story is reminiscent of, and arguably indebted to, Vladimir Nabokov’s metafictional novel Pale Fire (1962), a narrative famously comprised of a character’s foreword, index and commentary on a murdered poet’s 999-line poem. As Pale Fire progresses, rather than shedding light on the elliptical poem, these fictional paratexts instead begin to illuminate the delusional psychological state of the annotator.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Continuing these techniques, the use of the classical paratext as a vehicle for story is probably best encapsulated in Ballard’s The Index. The narrative is conveyed via the listed index to an imaginary autobiography that, as the short introduction informs us, is missing, or may never have existed at all. Small snippets of information in the index ultimately converge to form narratives that spectacularly reveal Ballardian obsessions with mental breakdown, sexual deviance, murder, psychological spaces and institutional confinement.

It is these themes that also dominate ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, a piece that functions more by exclusion, than inclusion. Employing the metafictional technique of showing only the answers to questions set by an unknown authoritarian presence, a narrative becomes clear that would traditionally far exceed the limitations of a short story. As the answers progress, we learn that the interviewee is a man living surreptitiously in Ballard’s beloved Heathrow Airport:

1) Yes.
2) Male (?)
3) c/o Terminal 3, London Airport, Heathrow.
4) Twenty-seven.
5) Unknown.
6) Dr Barnado’s Primary, Kingston-upon-Thames; HM Borstal, Send, Surrey; Brunel University Computer Sciences Department.

Sometimes the answers are deliberately obtuse, with no obvious allusion to a potential question. At other times the answers are detailed in an ironic way, completely out place with the sequence of narrative events (see answer 14 below). We soon learn about the interviewee, including his criminal history:

10) Manchester Crown Court, 1984.
11) Credit card and computer fraud.
12) Guilty.
13) Two years, HM Prison, Parkhurst.
14) Stockhausen, de Kooning, Jack Kerouac.
15) Whenever possible.
16) Twice a day.
17) NSU, Herpes, gonorrhoea.

It becomes clear that the interviewee believes he befriended the second coming of Jesus within Heathrow Airport, and begins to help him with his project to provide mankind with the power of immortality:

27) I took him to Richmond Ice Rink where he immediately performed six triple salchows. I urged him to take up ice-dancing with an eye to the European Championships and eventual gold at Seoul, but he began to trace out huge double spirals on the ice. I tried to convince him that these did not feature in the compulsory figures, but he told me that the spirals represented a model of synthetic DNA.
35) When he was drunk. He claimed that he brought the gift of eternal life.
61) He stated that synthetic DNA introduced into the human germ plasm would arrest the process of ageing and extend human life almost indefinitely.
81) Government White Paper on Immortality.
82) Compulsory injection into the testicles of the entire male population over eleven years.

The protagonist accompanies this man, as he meets with members of the royal family, politicians and celebrities in a bid to raise money for the Immortality project. The plan clearly gets out of control for the interviewee, as he takes matters into his own hands:

88) Assassination.
89) I was neither paid nor incited by agents of a foreign power.
90) Despair. I wish to go back to my cubicle at London Airport.
97) I was visited in the death cell by the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
98) That I had killed the Son of God.
99) He walked with a slight limp. He told me that, as a condemned prisoner, I alone had been spared the sterilising injections, and that the restoration of the national birthrate was now my sole duty.
100) Yes.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 2 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Ballard’s investment in us as active readers also allows meaning to be gained from absence. Ballard finds his preoccupations and themes best explored through the paratexts that traditionally surround culture’s dominant storytelling mediums. A list of answers, an index, and the footnotes of a single sentence become vehicles for the Ballardian. It is within this free interplay with the reader that we are able to construct a narrative, regardless of how unreliable the protagonist may or may not be. Within these empty spaces and narrative vacuums, the reader is empowered to create meaning. The dichotomous function of these omissions provoke us to address the character’s mental state, and serves to further problematise the role of the unreliable narrator/s within. As the author Ursula K Le Guin states in her review of War Fever, Ballard opts for storytelling in which we see the ‘condition of fictional bones without flesh — crystals without molecular instabilities to cloud the clarity’. Ballard uses metatextual techniques to highlight the devices of fiction and in doing so, provokes the reader to dwell on the relationships between fantasy and reality, concepts central to ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’.

It is these narrative devices so rooted in the literary form of the story that potentially problematise a cinematic adaptation (yet also make the concept very alluring). Conceived from the perspective that the source material is merely a starting point, Alvise Renzini’s short animation Grande Anarca diverts from ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ in a number of notable ways. Although strongly influenced by the unusual structure of Ballard’s original text, the film completely dispenses with the central storyline of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, ignoring the second-coming, immortality project, murder of Jesus plot points. However, there is continuity in the film’s eerie voiceover, as the omnipotent narrator answers a set of unheard questions. Replacing the Jesus narrative with a story regarding a genetic experiment carried out on the inhabitants of a block of flats, the film also manages to confront and adapt the medium-specific tropes encoded in the literary form of the source material.

Although Renzini is credited with photography, animation and direction, the film is clearly a group effort, produced under the ‘joint tradename’ of Opificio Ciclope. Producers of various media forms, including music videos, TV graphics and documentaries, the Italian collective purports to have a ‘shared interest for interacting, mixed techniques and hybrid formats’. It is certainly this mastering of art/media forms that bestows Grande Anarca with a unique visual complexity.

The film is literally multi-layered, the images painstakingly built up in successive levels. Firstly, the background is hand-illustrated, the images then photographed and projected as slides. These slide projections are then shot using 35mm film, the individual frames then serving as a canvass to be painted and etched upon. Finally, digital post-production provides the last layer to complete the film. This inter-medial technique for building a film layer-by-layer brings to mind the German short film Copyshop (2001) in which a photocopy shop worker begins to literally replicate himself in an endless cycle. The short is produced by filming almost 18,000 photocopies of digital frames. It could be said that these animation devices, particularly well executed in Grande Anarca, in which the viewer is confronted with the mechanics and textual processes of the medium, somehow mirror the self-conscious literary referencing of Ballard’s original story.

And it is within this visual process that Grande Anarca evokes much of its drama. Dark fractured imagery blends onto inanimate objects which drift into our vision, as obscured tower blocks meld into shimmering close-ups of cells and bacteria. Distorted alien-like bodies glimmer before us, gasworks flash, abject bodies morph into DNA structures. Buildings vying for dominance over nature obtain a hallucinatory quality as swift editing coupled with repetitious music (dramatic repeating violin chords) compliment the images of tree like cells inhabiting cityscapes. The film ranges between stark black and white before displaying sepia tinted browns and blues. Although ostensibly an animation, the film does feature real footage of apartment blocks and abandoned train stations. The geometrics of man-made, Vorticist shapes mingle haphazardly with biological structures. The calm, dispassionate voiceover and the melodious repetition of the music almost produce a feeling that we are watching a propaganda film, benevolently advertising a social experiment, only the visuals offering a sinister reminder that all is not well.

The story that unfolds in Grande Anarca is clearly a major deviation from Ballard’s source story, but it is the narrative replacements that really illuminate the film-makers application to the task. The answers start off relatively dull, though are notable by their contrast to Ballard’s original text:

01) Corals.
02) Light.
03) A face-shaped flower vase.
04) Glaciers.
05) Emerald green.
06) Science fiction books: Fritz Leiber, James Ballard, Stanislaw Lem.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

As the film develops, it becomes clear that the narrator was involved in a complex genetic experiment on the inhabitants of a huge multi-storey building:

20) Tenants were selected from thousands of applicants.
21) Yes, I think it was a crucial event in my life.
22) Apartments were identical in shape, size, and decors. The building was divided into 22 units, identified with a letter. Each unit had 8 floors. Each floor housed 64 persons in as many apartments. The whole of the tenants were divided in 4 groups: A, T, C, G. The building contained 5632 persons.
23) I was part of the original project team, and I came up with several of the ideas in the experiment.

Importantly, the inhabitants of the building are represented by the protagonist as being both co-operative and willing participants:

30) All the tenants were aware of the nature of the experiment in different ways. I would not therefore paint in-house relations as unconscious.
31) They were deeply involved in the experiment, and they talked about it regularly: when they met on the stairs or in the garden, or during building meetings.
32) Each tenant had to spend 4 hours with the other three individuals on his team, then 8 hours on his own. He had to write 4 pages a day. In the early stages, that was how we looked for similar descriptions, cross-references, reoccurring words. At a later stage, they were forced to write about their personal desires. Finally, about their dreams.
33) In each apartment, a pneumatic system provided food rations in exchange for the reports. Locks were automatically operated. To open the doors, tenants had to deliver their daily reports.

Eventually we see thematic cross-overs with Ballard’s original story, as the synthetic depiction of DNA creates a startling psycho-pathologic relationship:

36) The building was a to-scale replica of the DNA from algae. Tenants represented nucleotides.
37) We wanted to communicate directly with the DNA, with no go-betweens.
38) We wanted to endow it with some sort of awareness.
39) By collecting the tenants’ dreams.
40) We measured everything: heartbeats, the patterns created on the windows by electric light, decibels. Everything.

As the voiceover draws the film to a close we start to view the possibility that Renzini is sourcing more than just one Ballard text, with allusions to the effects of the building architectures acting as a kind of Tarkovskian Zone:

48) During the third stage, the building started to emit a frequency at night, while the tenants slept. The wave reached a range of over 20 kilometers. Suddenly everyone was aware of the experiment.
49) The wave from the building reverberated through the dreams of whoever lived in the area. It was those obsessive dreams that spurred the riots.
50) Lies, now as before, you keep repeating your lies.
51) That was not our purpose.
52) I would rather not talk about that.
53) Several such buildings were destroyed by mistake.
54) Scientific research is not a democratic system, nor should it be.
55) The experiment could be repeated.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 3 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

In Grande Anarca we see the narrative structure of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ married to the Ballardian tropes of urban alienation, techno-surveillance, sociological experimentation and the psychological consequences of man-made environments, as best exemplified in High-Rise (1975). So whilst the film may break free from the plot points of the source story, it still exists within a wider Ballardian universe. We see the moral complexity of social experimentation, the actions of a closed community reverting to a primal state and the symbiotic relationship between man and urban structures. As Rick McGrath states in his affectionate and incredibly detailed analysis of the novel, ‘Reconstructing High-Rise’:

The horror of meaningless acts piled high with Ballard’s trademark detatched omnipotent narrator. High-Rise can both shock and exhilarate its reader, and its insistence that the ‘ends justify the means’ reinforces Ballard’s geometry of violence…

Further to this we see textual equivalents in the actions of individuals acting as a group, and the type of belief systems (religious, political and moral) that can become normalised in the reverie of community psychology. McGrath again illuminates these notions of the intoxicating myth:

J.G. Ballard has often told interviewers that his characters all seek a kind of highly personal psychic salvation, and that they will, if necessary, create their own self-defining mythologies and pursue them to their furthest logical ends, no matter how illogical it seems, or what the cost. In High-Rise, Ballard has created an isolated environment for the close study of the deconstruction of an ultra-modern apartment block into a new, devolved society…

The compliance of the subjects in the film to willingly engage with these socio-scientific experiments, even though their food can be kept from them if they do not co-operate, draws on some well explored Ballardian areas. What is exposed in both High-Rise and Grande Anarca is a pathological willingness to be imprisoned or otherwise confined in institutional regimes. As Ballard puts it in a 2001 Literary Review article, we can see ‘hints that a benign version of a Sadeian society is still emerging, of tormentors and willing victims’. Ballard explores the willingness to be dominated by these architectures of control, as the character Sinclair notes in Super-Cannes (2000), these ‘totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong’.

Unfortunately, Grande Anarca is far from perfect, and at least for me, fails on one quite fundamental level. In most cases I am an admirer of extreme deviation from the adapted source material, but Renzini, like so many others, appears to disregard or ignore the ironic humour that saturates most pages of Ballard’s writing. From the opening line of High-Rise, through to most of the chapter titles in The Atrocity Exhibtion, Ballard is able to infuse his stories with subtle but biting wit. Taking ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ as an example, many of the protagonist’s answers are nothing more than in-jokes as Ballard plays with the edges of humour in ways that are reminiscent both of Bret Easton Ellis and William S Burroughs:

33) Porno videos. He took a particular interest in Kamera Klimax and Electric Blue.
34) Almost every day.
36) At the Penta Hotel I tried to introduce him to Torvill and Dean…
37) Females of all ages.
38) Group sex.
58) He had a keen appreciation of money, but was not impressed when I told him of Torvill and Dean’s earnings.
63) He announced that Princess Diana was immortal.
71) He wanted me to become the warhead of a cruise missile.

The humour found in Ballard’s work is usually satirical, sometimes surreal, and always illustrative of the moral malaise infused through the story. To ignore Ballard’s humour, as I feel the makers of Grande Anarca have done, is to reduce Ballard to less than the sum of his parts. But these actions could be considered deliberate aesthetic acts, removing humour for the sake of some artistic achievement.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Traditionally, fans of Ballard’s writing have had an uneasy relationship with adaptations of his writing. It seems that for some, films that explore Ballardian themes, or which have influenced Ballard, can offer more comforting routes to understand his work. These include both Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and Solyaris (1972), Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Lucas’ THX 1138 (1971), and of course the most potent Ballardian film, Chris Marker’s remarkable short La Jetée (1962). All benefit from their potential to be arguably more useful cinematic texts with which to contextualise Ballardian tropes, than actual official adaptations of his own books. These films are liberated from the compare-contrast analysis that dogs literal Ballard adaptations such as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) and Weiss’ The Atrocity Exhibition (2000), amongst a host of others. The confining responsibility of fidelity can raise the stakes for the Ballard reader, in which we are not always able to read these films either objectively or fairly.

Cronenberg, both in Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash attempts to decant experimental literary narratives into a more linear cinematic language (albeit an idiosyncratically unorthodox one). Perhaps to the point where his earlier films Videodrome (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988) could be seen as a more fitting arena to explore the Ballardian. Likewise, Spielberg’s moral subjectivity, a kind of revisionist 50′s idea of ‘Boys Own’ heroism and the inevitable triumph of good over evil, constrains his adaptation of Empire of the Sun. To the point where many, as before, may find more interesting material in his Duel (1971) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) with which to better understand the relationship between Ballard and cinema. It is left to one’s imagination to wonder what could have occurred if counter-intuitively, Cronenberg had taken on Empire the Sun, and Spielberg tackled the auto-erotic allegories of Crash.

I believe that Weiss’ over-faithful use of iconic 60s imagery in his bold reworking of The Atrocity Exhibition makes the film stand out for me, in contrast to some who believe that these images lack cultural punch due to their sell-by-date expiring. In contrast to this, Renzini instead prefers to place further abstractions onto the source text. However, what the film does share with both Cronenberg and Weiss is a desire to inhabit the universe of the Ballardian. Far from slavishly conforming to Roland Barthes’ battle-cry that the ‘birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,’ Renzini pursues a thornier path – casting aside the author’s original narrative and replacing it with something that is loosely Ballardian, rather than strictly Ballard.

Perhaps there is something inherent in Ballard’s writing that actively resists successful adaptation. McGrath’s previous mention of Ballard’s trademark ‘detatched omnipotent narrator’ could be regarded as a profoundly uncinematic central character. Taking this further, McGrath expounds on the dynamically impotent character of Laing in High-Rise and the way in which he ‘survives because his driving psychic force is self-preservation through isolation and passivity’. Again, perhaps cinematic narratives resist passive characters, demanding more open, morally unambiguous, actively obstacle defeating heroes. This in marked contrast to the types that survive the carnage of High-Rise simply by keeping their head down, staying quiet and isolating themselves from the mayhem. It could also be argued that some adaptations fail because the source material is so prescriptive; readerly texts that imprint visual codas onto the reader, allowing little in the way of artistic flourishes for the adaptor. However, with Ballard the opposite could be true. The moral ambiguity, detached solipsism, and exclusion of characters’ first person psycho-dynamics mean that we can only form vague (yet highly personal) ideas of main protagonists. When we encounter these people on screen, in the flesh, saying words, and reacting to external agents, it is possible that we balk at both the unavoidable physical humanity before us, and the distinctly un-Ballardian theatrics of film-acting which we excluded from our original reading.

Grande Anarca enjoys a curiously dichotomous romance with Ballard. The aims seem contradictory: rejecting Ballard’s authority over the story, yet clearly conforming to the author’s recognised signifiers and themes. In the process of leaving the story behind, the makers of this film enter into a new dialogue, re-inhabiting and re-acquiring universal themes of the Ballardian, displaying what the Collins English Dictionary famously describes as ‘dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments’.

… MORE INFO:

+ Information on Grande Anarca at Opificio Ciclope

… GRANDE ANARCA:

+ Grande Anarca Part 1
+ Grande Anarca Part 2
+ Grande Anarca Part 3

+ English translation of the voiceover.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation of Tiny Colour Movies, a selection of found-film fragments. Regular readers will recall that I interviewed Foxx in 2006, when the TCM album had just been released. At the time John was maintaining the line that the album was the soundtrack to a found-film collection owned by one Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, who, we were told, collects home movies and ‘repurposed movie fragments’, indeed any type of film produced outside of commercial considerations and not meant for public consumption. John, so the story goes, attended a private screening of Arnold’s collection and was compelled to create a soundtrack to accompany these resonant images, what he calls ‘tiny colour movies’.

According to the TCM liner notes:

Arnold stipulates that the movies he collects must be short — none is more than seven or eight minutes long, and some have a duration of only a few seconds. He insists that these represent a new kind of art. One which is only now becoming possible to recognise. Photography has recently become acknowledged as a new technological art form and commercial cinema is currently undergoing this kind of reassessment … these ideas cross over with Stanley Brakhage. Indeed Arnold was very excited when he discovered Brakhage’s work a few years ago, since he feels it confirms many of his long held views about the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of film fragments.

John Foxx, TCM liner notes (2006).

ABOVE: ‘Stray Sinatra Neurone’ by ‘Max Forbert’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

One of the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection is a certain Max Forbert, who makes what John terms ‘assemblage movies’. Forbert, supposedly a janitor in Hollywood, collected film scraps saved from the cutting-room floors he was sweeping for a living and later compiled them into his own sampled productions, a fragment of which was found by Arnold after Forbert’s death:

This is a section of a Forbert film that he identifies as using cutting room outtakes from a Sinatra movie, among others which remain unidentified. Shots are: Back view of a man in a suit looking through the window of a set interior (too tall for Sinatra — possibly an extra brought in to test-light a scene). Some brief outdoor shots of cars driving through a glittering downtown New York. Close-up of a woman applying deep red lipstick — again this appears to be a test shot of make-up and lighting. Location shots of Paris and Rome. Intricately cut together, these damaged fragments become an almost tactile essay on the sensual textures and enigmatic images that film can make available.

Foxx, TCM liner notes.

In the liner notes, John talks of the beauty of the imperfections in the films, the scratches and grain, the bleaching from wear and age, ‘elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film’. Tiny Colour Movies, then, is not only an interesting document but also one that has overtly Ballardian overtones. For starters, there’s Ballard’s own interest in the subversive potential of home movies. But also, as I tried to tease out in the interview, The Atrocity Exhibition features many examples similar to what John identifies as a ‘sample film aesthetic’ in the Weizcs-Bryant collection, including therapeutic DIY film groups designed to aid the recovery of schizhophrenic patients:

Cine-films as group therapy. Patients were encouraged to form a film production unit, and were given full freedom as to choice of subject matter, cast and technique. In all cases explicitly pornographic films were made. Two films in particular were examined: (1) A montage sequence using portions of the faces of (a) Madame Ky, (b) Jeanne Moreau, (c) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking). The use of a concealed stroboscopic device produced a major optical flutter in the audience, culminating in psychomotor disturbances and aggressive attacks directed against the still photographs of the subjects hung from the walls of the theatre. (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. By chance it was found that slow-motion sequences of this film had a marked sedative effect, reducing blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates. Hypnagogic images were produced freely by patients. The film was also found to have a marked erotic content.

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Throughout Atrocity, T-, the book’s troubled protagonist, stitches and sutures together fragments from the media landscape — TV broadcasts, snatches of film, billboard representations of movie stars, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination (even the ‘time music of the quasars’, derived from a strange contraption on his roof, a sculpture consisting of ‘antennae of metal aerials’) — into a form that will make sense to his disordered psyche. This is most clearly expressed in Ballard’s dictum that politics today has become a branch of advertising that sells personalities rather than policies, and that as a result politicians involve us in their fantasies without our consent — fantasies of power, ego, domination, celebrity, lust, all disguised as governance but which are really designed to place us in peripheral roles as impotent bystanders in the major decisions affecting our lives. In Atrocity, then, Ballard’s schizophrenic patients involve politicians in their fantasies, notably the hapless figure of Ronald Reagan:

The conceptual role of Reagan. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality… In assembly kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

ABOVE: T- devising the ‘optimum sex death of Ronald Reagan’ in Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Essentially, T- reclaims the inner space he feels has been invaded by media and advertising — the colonisation of the subconscious and the stealing of his memories — repopulating it with a collaged, open-ended landscape of images drawn from the free circulation of signs and signals of what we can now view, with hindsight, as Ballard’s own proto version of hyperreality.

As Ballard says,

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.

J.G. Ballard, annotations (1994) to The Atrocity Exhibition.

This strategy of treating all media and perceptual inputs as equal, with no distinction between the inner world of fantasy and the outer world of reality, seems a clear precursor to the kind of culture-jamming hacktivism that would reach a peak in the 90s with the sound artists Negativland and their followers:

Negativland occupies itself with recontextualizing captured fragments to create something entirely new — a psychological impact based on a new juxtaposition of diverse elements, ripped from their usual context, chewed up, and spit out as a new form of hearing the world around us.

As audio artists, we pursue a uniquely contemporary and wholly appropriate creative process which inevitably emerges out of our electronic age of media saturation and the reproducing technologies available to all consumers.

Negativland, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995).

ABOVE: JGB in London Orbital.

More explicitly, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, in the film version of London Orbital, acknowledge a clear debt to Ballard, whose influence over the film looms large, both in the interview with him in the middle section and in the reading by Sinclair of JGB’s ‘What I Believe’ that frames it. Sinclair and Petit see the Bluewater shopping centre, ‘Ground Zero’ for the film’s aesthetic, as an architecture mediated by technology, specifically the omniscient CCTV cameras which in their endless, plastic and formless state create what the filmmakers call ‘a new nostalgia, a new boredom, a new kind of time’. If everything is filmable then, Petit and Sinclair’s method of resistance is to become like the surveillance camera, to always be open and to always be filming but to locate the degradations in the tape, the fraying at the edges, recovering and recycling elements of old technologies, what Esther Leslie calls an ‘aesthetic of refuse’, drawing on the double meaning of ‘refuse’: as both rubbish, in that if everything is filmable then everything is junk, valueless; and as resistance, ie refusing to be dissolved into the ‘electronic slums’, to use Petit’s term. Thus Sinclair inserts his home movies into the end of the film, recovering a memory that is in danger of being overwritten yet still framed in the logic of the image, both inside and outside at once — an aesthetic that instantly recalls Atrocity and many other Ballard stories.

Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies project seems a direct descendant of this lineage, especially given this statement of John’s from our interview:

Movies will be played with, just as sound was sampled, for fun and surrealism. Simply because it can be done. I remember positing this five years ago in a talk at the London College of Music and Media. Around that time, I made a movie called A Man Made of Shadows from several other movies. This made a new movie from existing films by collaging, repurposing, hommaging, stealing, sampling, appropriating. Whatever you like to call it. ‘Repurposing’ is my current fave term, along with ‘theft’. Watch out Hollywood. Movies had better get used to this because it will happen. Inevitable.
…
We’ll also need to develop new aesthetics of film, to regard elements formerly regarded as faults as intrinsic qualities inherent in film itself. The beauty of scratches, bleached out film ends, emulsion faults, grain, frameslip, etc. Just as we now value surface scratches in audio sampling.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Lost New York’ by ‘George Wilkes’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

So, freighted with all of this intertextual baggage, I was therefore very excited to learn that John was bringing the Arnold collection to Melbourne; I knew he’d premiered it overseas with a live soundtrack, but that’s about all I knew. I hadn’t really done much research on John since we last communicated, but I still harboured the suspicion that, as I detailed in the afterword to the interview, Arnold and the filmmakers were fictitious personas and that the films were in fact John’s own inventions. I sensed various clues that gave the game away including the name of one of the filmmakers, ‘Alan Marker’. This seemed far too close to the aura of Chris Marker (but with an amusingly British first name), especially given John’s stated admiration for La Jetée, which of course is also about memory being overwritten and recovered.

I felt there were more clues, not least the fact that the synopses of the various filmmakers and their motivations in the liner notes to the album resembled John’s own very individualistic short stories, especially one he wrote a while back called ‘The Quiet Man’ (for even with the best of intentions the best of artists can find it hard to disguise their ‘voice’ when inhabiting alter egos):

The old newscasts affected him greatly, the Kennedy Assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly worn Black and White. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on.

One of his favourite films was The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, and he often played this without the soundtrack, drowning in the crude beauty of its early technicolour.

At home, too, he kept a small 8mm projector for playing home movies that he came across in his exploration of the city’s deserted apartments. He was fascinated by all the tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years.

John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1978.

In fact, my musings sparked off quite a bit of debate in various forums about the nature of Arnold, with many people, including myself, initially believing the entire story of Mr Weizcs-Bryant and his amazing collection of found film.

But John remained tight-lipped… or so I thought. More on that later.

ABOVE: ‘Skyscraper’ by ‘Jerry Golden’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

From the first film of the performance, I was drawn into the degraded beauty of the Super 8 footage and the blown-out and colour-saturated celluloid on display. And yes, this was clearly found footage, the genuine article. It appeared I was wrong — you can’t fake period details, hairstyles and cars, on John’s limited budget. But it had been assembled artfully, like the looped film of traffic on LA freeways drawing out the beauty of this perpetual motion sculpture. Or time-lapsed shadows and sunlight passing across buildings, slowed down or reversed, the motion of the elements becoming imperceptible, the buildings and backgrounds the same but not quite as shadows gently ripple across them as if the fabric of time and molecular space was slowly re-weaving itself. When a building became covered completely in shadow, the film was edited so that another building emerged from the black and into daylight, a slow modernist dance of compacted grace and proportion. It seemed a trick of the mind designed to evoke the passing of civilisation, like the classic Ballardian ideal that treats reality as just a stage set that can be pulled away at any moment.

At this point, I thought I might need to re-assess: if these films were genuine, maybe Arnold was, too.

There was much to enjoy throughout the program. Extraterrestrial, sun-soaked clouds magnified to massive proportions so that they seemed composed of nothing but pure colour and grain. Flickering film projected onto women’s faces, turning them into shapeshifting cats and dogs with whiskers and elongated ears. A naked woman underwater, swimming among the wrecks of submerged automobiles as the sunlight from above the surface turns her and everything it touches into a blue dream.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Underwater Automobiles’ by ‘Robert Rouncefield’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

But then I began to imagine that John had made a very clever play: he’d inserted what I was sure were his own films into the found footage. The giveaway for me was twofold. First, the film ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’ featuring a man walking into a series of smoke-filled rooms — we never see his face as it is either obscured by smoke, or he is filmed from the side or behind. In the liner notes, Arnold says this:

I saw these marvellously lit sequences which seemed to have a very definite story, yet there is no explanation or development or resolution. We can have no idea what the filmmaker had in mind. Because of this lack of resolution, they seem strangely suspended. You begin to make connections, you feel compelled to write a story. But there is none. There can be none. The effect is tantalising, like a damaged and incomplete fragment of memory.

But, I’m sure, both the film and this explanation is very obviously the voice of Foxx; this film, to me, is another iteration of Foxx’s ‘quiet man’ persona, the ghost moving through the streets of the city, his identity never quite coalescing, always escaping the gaze. As John has said, ‘The point of view I’ve always worked from is that of a ghost in the city — someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker — but still vulnerable and trying against the odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static.’

ABOVE: ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

There appeared to be more confirmation in the film ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’, a montage of shots supposedly featuring a mysterious extra from Hollywood films:

He has appeared in dozens of major Hollywood movies and American television series, yet he is completely unknown to the public. He appears as a background character, a passer-by, often wearing a grey suit, or a raincoat. His calm unhurried walk, his spectacles, his lapel flower and his habit of turning his head briefly (seemingly so that his face will be momentarily on the film), are what eventually make him distinctive. The film was researched and assembled by the man who first discovered his existence, Evan Parker. Parker is an academic whose field is the evolution of Hollywood. In the course of his studies, Parker watched hundreds of films and had begun to speculate about making a study of the extras, those figures passing by in the background. That is when he began to notice one who appeared to be present in several movies. Intrigued, Parker began a search and was surprised to discover the presence of this figure in dozens of major and minor Hollywood movies. This is a slow-motion montage of all the clips of his appearances so far discovered. His identity remains unknown.

TCM liner notes.

Note the reference to the GREY suit!

‘A Peripheral Character’ is an intriguing concept and very well put together, but at times you could tell John had judiciously selected clips of not the same mysterious person, but of similar looking actors from dozens of films, always with their face half turned away, or shot from behind, or bending over — you might just be convinced if you weren’t paying close enough attention that you were viewing just the one ghost in the city.

By the program’s end, I felt as if I’d finally worked it out for sure: that ‘Arnold Weizcs-Bryant’ was merely another psuedonym for Dennis Leigh (Foxx’s real name), and that it was indeed John Foxx himself who is the passionate collector of found footage, the underground filmmaker inspired by what he has stumbled across to create his own ‘sample films’, his own ‘tiny colour movies’…

And the live music? Well, it was classic Foxx, yes, lovely electronic washes drifting as timelessly as the shadows and sunlight of the films. I do like John’s work, but even so I have to say I was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be much improvisation, given that this was ostensibly a live performance of the soundtrack. Tracks stopped and started exactly when the films did, and it all seemed a bit too perfectly sequenced, too faithful to the CD. I would have liked more of a continuous flow, more segues to sustain the atmosphere, more improv, more of the scratches, collages and squelches that John so admires in the films, for as good as the music is, it just seems far too clean, too digital in the live context to suit the conceptual conceit of the films themselves. As a standalone CD it’s great; as an audiovisual package, I’m not so sure.

And then it was question time, and John appeared from behind his bank of keyboards, dressed head to toe in black like a handsomer version of Lux Interior. Before the show I’d thought of sticking my hand up and asking him if Arnold really did exist, but as I was watching the films I decided it just didn’t matter at all to me anymore. Whatever the answer, either way, John’s assemblage of the results had become compelling — if John wanted to keep up the pretense, if indeed that’s what it was, I was happy to play along. Besides I’d already voiced my suspicions two years ago and I didn’t want to seem like a curmudgeon or a stalker by hounding him forever more about it. Also, I was curious to see if anyone else in the audience would broach the subject. Perhaps no-one even cares…

ABOVE: Stills from ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

Questions were asked about Ultravox, about the soundtrack and always John’s answers were mystical, evasive, talking of dreams and flight. Then someone asked him about the Hollywood extra. ‘Did you ever ask Arnold if he had any info on the extra, or whether he’d tried to trace his identity?’ John fidgeted, looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Er… no’ he replied. The mere mention of Arnold appeared to be making him nervous.

Then someone else stuck up a hand. ‘John, I read the piece on Ballardian where you talk about the influence of J.G. Ballard on your work.’ Ah, he’d read my interview, meaning he’d know of the afterword where I first expressed my doubts! We were getting warm, no doubt about it, but would this guy pop the burning question? But ‘Which of his novels is your favourite?’ was the interrogation and the moment had passed again.

A few more questions and then someone asked John if he wanted a beer. He quickly said he’d love one, but then just as quickly said his goodbyes and hustled off the stage, always the enigma, always elusive, never to be seen again. The end.

And I couldn’t help but think of part 2 of our interview, for I was greatly surprised to see him in Melbourne in the first place.

Because when I asked him if he would ever tour Australia, this is what he said: ‘I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now…’

POSTSCRIPT: After the screening, my dormant interest in John Foxx was reignited and I went Googling for more information. As I mentioned, all I really knew of the background to this project was what had emerged in our interview. As far as I knew, for others, as it was for me, the mystery was still sustainable. Little did I know that John had recently come clean! In this post on John’s forum, for example, it’s claimed that ‘The footage that JF and Mike Barker use in TCM is bought at car boot sales, jumble sales and at market stalls. Sometimes people put their home movie collections up for grabs on ebay… this is then digitised and re-edited to produce TCM.’

And this is confirmed in an interview John did just before the Melbourne screening:

I used to buy reels of film (from Brick Lane and Portobello Road markets) and didn’t know what they were and view them to see if there was anything interesting on them. Eventually I amassed all this stuff and didn’t quite know what to do with it. Then I saw this collector’s reel of films one night and thought ‘Yeah — that’s exactly right! It is finite. It does have a place in history’. And some of it is unique and some of the stories behind the pieces are very interesting too. It’s like reading an obituary; which is something I like — it’s not morbid at all. It’s very interesting because you get a summation of someone’s life and their achievements…

So, is it actually John’s collection on display? It would appear that way, yes, judging by this interview. It would appear that Arnold is John, just as John is Dennis. And what of the filmmakers and their backstories? As I wrote in the afterword to the 2006 interview, after mulling over the ‘Frank Watts’ film:

Urban drift; walking through the city; submitting to psychic entry points … surely this is yet another brilliantly evocative John Foxx short story? Yes — the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the case … re-reading the liner notes, the parallels with these ‘filmmakers’, with their obsessions and aesthetics, to Foxx himself now seem all too obvious (let’s not forget that ‘John Foxx’ is a character that Dennis Leigh himself has said he inhabits because ‘John Foxx is smarter than me’).

Arnold’s ‘filmmakers’ are called Robert Rouncefield; Jerry Golden; Earnst Lubin — like ‘John Foxx’, these are humdrum yet fanciful names, mythical yet ordinary, dull names to the point of incandescence. Their bios and summaries exhibit all the traits of the condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But there would be one final nail in the coffin…

ABOVE: John Foxx answering audience questions after the Sydney screening of TCM.

Something else I found in my latest research was this video of John’s Q&A after the Sydney performance of TCM. Note that this was filmed the day after the Melbourne gig. Now recall the Melbourne audience member who asked John if he wanted a beer. Finally, watch the Sydney video: as the uploader writes, ‘Note the beer in his hand. Someone from the audience was kind enough to rush off and get him one.’

Someone had obviously been taking notes in Melbourne, had flown up to Sydney, and wasn’t letting John rush off the stage without a drink this time!

Perhaps they thought the beer might loosen his tongue just a little. Indeed, it appears that way for in this Q&A John is far more expansive and revealing than in the session I attended, and even goes so far as to say that some of the TCM movies are outright fiction, ‘complete lies’ as he calls them, created by him under the guise of a fictitious filmmaker and inserted into the program to mess with the audience’s perception:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Did you cut some of those movies up?

JOHN FOXX: Oh, some of them were invented. And some aren’t. And I want to use these films as a way of telling stories. And being dishonest. Because I think dishonesty’s really interesting. What do you call someone who tries to convince you that something is true when it’s not? You call them a liar, don’t you? So what do you call an author? And that’s the thing that really interests me, is that line between truth and fiction. So some things are true in the movies, and some are complete lies. And I think it’s very interesting to try and work out which is which. Some of them are totally fabricated and some aren’t. But they’re all made up of the real thing.

So what one of the filmmakers practices, in other words cutting Hollywood up into pieces and reassembling it, I’ve been doing as well. And I want to continue doing that, because I think film is raw material now, to be used in any way we want. We’ve all grown up with that stuff. And I even dream it. Because I went to the cinema when I was 7, 6, 5 years old in Lancashire. And Lancashire was so grey, in England, and the cinema was so grey, everything merged together. You know, I was usually covered in soot when I was a kid, and everything was in black and white, the factory chimneys and smoke and all that, and when I looked on the screen it was the same thing. So all my memories of it are mixed up in the movies, old science fiction movies and utter rubbish. None of which I could understand as a kid, so I had to make things up with a kit from my own mind. It became a part of my dream language. And I still dream it. So I think we all mix stuff in strange ways because it’s in our heads, isn’t it? We’ve grown up with it. So why not reassemble it in the way we want to? Because we own it, you know — we don’t have to be dominated by it. It’s ours for God’s sake, not theirs — we own it.

However, I’m glad I went into the screening not knowing about John’s admission. It meant there was still a bit of mystery and wonder about the project, it meant I could ‘script’ the story a little bit as I tried to link and crosslink various ideas and theories — using a ‘kit’ from my own mind.

Does John’s admission matter in the end? No — the project stands on its own merits. I was reminded of how many people still take Empire of the Sun to be Ballard’s autobiography, and how they are often greatly surprised and sometimes angry to discover the book is as ‘fictional’ as the rest of his novels. In this day and age, surely it is not too farfetched to suggest that authenticity is just another mask? I personally love the idea of creating a character and inhabiting it so that the boundaries become blurred, inhabiting the interzones and interstitial zones, ‘the yes or no of the borderzone’ to borrow a phrase from Atrocity, escaping definition and classification.

As does Ballard, for that matter, who has his own passion for the idea of faked newsreels, and the notion of fiction passed off as truth:

The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent, usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me — my version of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or All Quiet on the Western Front would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in Open City and Paisa.

J.G. Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1994.

For anyone interested in Ballard — especially Atrocity — and experimental film, John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies performance is highly recommended. I’m not sure any of it is especially ‘cutting edge’ — Foxx’s liner notes, for example, state that the Alan Marker stuff (as commanding as it is, one of my favourites from the set) is ‘surely unique in the history of filmmaking’, yet I saw the exact same technique performed with skulls and ghost imagery last week in Melbourne by Australian artists who’d been practising it for some time. And overall, in terms of experimental and repurposed film, the phenomenal, unparalleled work of the likes of Guy Sherwin, the old master, and Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, the heirs, is certainly more of an assault in both audio and visual terms.

What Tiny Colour Movies undoubtedly is, however, is Foxxian: too cold by half for some, beautiful and sad for others, an industrial spiritualism and an unalloyed sensuality of machines.

Arnold Weizcs-Bryant: R.I.P.

..:: Previously:
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 1
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 2

..:: More information::
+ Metamatic: John Foxx’s official site
+ Tiny Colour Movies official site

Written & directed by: Simon Brook.
Based on the short story by: J.G. Ballard.
Produced by: Susanna Virtanen.
Music: Joshua Zaentz.

Starring: Alfred Hyslop, Paul Ravich, Earl Hagen, Bob Arcaro.

I’m probably biased, but in my estimation Ballard has hardly released a clunker — at least in novel form. Granted, The Wind from Nowhere is even in Ballard’s own analysis, ‘just a piece of hackwork’, knocked off in a matter of weeks to get a foot in the door, but still it has its moments. And the ones the critics loathe — Kingdom Come, say — reflect more the sour prejudice of mainstream media than they do Ballard. I find resonance with Kingdom Come each time I set foot outside my door. How many other 78-year-old novelists can we say that about?

But if we turn to the short stories it’s a slightly different matter, at least early on. ‘Now: Zero’ (1959), for example, was predicated on a last-sentence twist that was as corny as it was predictable. Ballard was big on the surprise reveal in those days, yet when it paid off the reward was secure. ‘Concentration City’, a classic short published two years before ‘Now Zero’, hinged on the sneak attack of the last line and was all the better for it. Even so, the feeling lingers that Ballard, pre-Atrocity Exhibition, was somewhat inconsistent, reinforced by the fact that ‘The Subliminal Man’, one of his very best stories (either novel or short), came out in 1963, the same year as one of his weakest efforts, ‘Minus One’.

‘Subliminal Man’ is quintessentially Ballardian: its sharply delineated descriptions of motorways, flyovers and shopping malls haven’t aged at all. As with the vision of urban panic in ‘Concentration City’, it works precisely because of the taste and restraint Ballard dedicates to the mise en scene; both stories are imbued with an uncanny resonance, the power of suggestion, as much for what they don’t reveal as for what they do. But ‘Minus One’, contextualised with the rest of the oeuvre, is completely baffling. It barely feels like Ballard at all, straining to make its point with considerable overkill.

‘Minus One’ is set in Green Hill Asylum, which ‘serves the role of a private prison’, catering to the very rich who dump their mentally defective relatives and lovers there — ‘abandoned casualties of the army of privilege’ — safe in the knowledge that these outcasts will not be seen nor heard from again; the asylum promises they won’t be re-entering society, presumably from a cocktail of drugs and shock treatment. But when a patient, Hinton, goes missing, the asylum’s director, Dr Mellinger, panics. Fearful of losing his job, he manages to convince his staff that Hinton never existed in the first place.

Although it’s not a bad premise, paradoxically the very nature of that premise reveals the story’s greatest flaw: it’s just too talky, with its tedious description (rather than depiction) of events. Yes, that’s necessary, given Hinton apparently doesn’t exist and therefore his ‘backstory’ can’t be shown, but it hardly makes for great writing. Ballard toys with the old ‘what is reality and who defines it?’ conundrum, and almost trips over his words describing Mellinger’s examination of Hinton’s ‘total existential role in the unhappy farce of which he was the author and principal star’. Perhaps we can detect the elements of a failed experiment here, the story’s overblown dialogue and interior monologues leading to a much more pared down and streamlined prose in Ballard’s late-60s works. But then again, even Ballard’s student story, ‘The Violent Noon’, written some 12 years earlier, seems to have a sharper blade. Maybe ‘Minus One’ was simply an aberration, reminding Ballard of the need to refocus; remember, ‘The Terminal Beach’, his stunning document of postwar malaise, came just one year later…

In ‘Minus One’ Ballard clearly has a point to make about the nature of psychiatry and its insular cabal but his heart just doesn’t seem in it, as when Mellinger meditates on Hinton’s file:

He refused to accept that this mindless cripple with his anonymous features could have been responsible for the confusion and anxiety of the previous day. Was it possible that these few pieces of paper constituted this meagre individual’s full claim to reality?

Unfortunately, the concept is not really developed beyond the ‘few pieces of paper’ analogy, and ultimately there is never any doubt that Hinton actually existed; the Ballard of just a few years’ hence would undoubtedly have heightened that ambiguity. Eventually the whole thing limps to a halt with yet another of Ballard’s patented twists in the tail, and while I admit I didn’t see it coming, after it unfurled itself I found it rather banal: potentially mindblowing, but, again, undercooked in its execution.

So, why did documentary filmmaker, Simon Brook, choose this story, this runt in JGB’s litter, as his first foray into film in 1991? I don’t really know, but I do know that ever since I saw a listing for it on IMDB I had to see it. So I tracked Simon down and asked him to send me a copy. (Note that as Simon now lives in France, he has requested I also upload a version with French subtitles, alongside the version you see at the start of this post.)

The film is undeniably stagey, but I’m guessing that had to have been a chief reason for Simon choosing the story; with a cast of four, set in a psychiatrist’s study, you won’t be needing a massive budget. Offsetting that, Simon’s fluid, restless camera extracts the maximum mileage from close angles and slow backward pans, relentlessly tracing the study’s cramped interior, mimicking the asylum’s stuffy worldview. Plus he cleverly mixes up the eyeline matches; the scenic parameters between two characters engaging in dialogue are never simply a matter of reversing the shot when one character is speaking to the other. Instead, we see perspectives from the side, from above, from everywhere. It’s a brisk cinematographic pace, but sometimes the pacing works against the film; if you slacken your concentration for a second or two you might actually miss the final twist.

The acting magnifies the overtly rhetorical language and vaudevillian aspects of Ballard’s story, an effect further intensified by Joshua Zaentz’s faux-chamber-music soundtrack. I can’t say any of that is to my taste. Alfred Hyslop, as Mellinger, eye-pops and mugs for the camera, veering dangerously close to Carry On territory, while Paul Ravich, the actor playing Booth, Mellinger’s main underling, comes to resemble the spaced-out astro-hippies in John Carpenter’s Dark Star. It’s all a bit much.

I can’t help wondering what the results would have been like if the film had played up the dark secret of the asylum, with its habit of making people disappear. There is a hint of this, when we learn that Dr Normand, who doesn’t go along with Mellinger’s methodology, has been lobotomised; that’s a great touch that wasn’t in Ballard’s story, but I’m really talking about mood and tone, and the acting and music, mainly. Combined with the twist in the end, enacted in Mellinger’s claustrophobic study, and Simon’s camera breathing down everyone’s necks, the effect could have been rather disturbing.

Still, this may well be the only time you will see Ballard played strictly for laughs. And for that, Simon Brook certainly deserves his place in the pantheon of unsung directors of JGB, alongside Potter, Cokliss, Scoggins and Cazals.

It’s not all Cronenberg and Spielberg, you know…

The final version of Thomas Cazals’ tribute, ‘J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton’, has been uploaded.

This is one of the stranger JGB-related films I’ve seen; ‘documentary’ is not quite the word for it, even as it functions as a biography of both Ballard and Shepperton.

Basically, it’s the story of Thomas’s doomed attempt to interview Ballard. He takes a taxi to Shepperton, and before he knows it is in a parallel dimension, being driven by a gruff hoodlum with clear contempt for his passenger. Shepperton motorways pass by, but only as a front projection; there is no taxi, just a car seat pretending to be one as Thomas and the driver go nowhere fast. The taxi driver, who is French speaking, tells Thomas he needs clearance to visit Shepperton, which is now the ‘new capital of the galaxy’, and we recognise the obvious nods to Godard’s Alphaville, in which Lemmy Caution similarly travels through ‘sidereal space’ in his Ford Galaxie. Finally, Thomas ‘lands’ in Shepperton and attempts to ring Ballard, but is rebuked, whining ‘I’m not an amateur’.

Weaving in and out of this is the story of Ballard’s life, told via newsreels and family snapshots. Basic canonical facts are strung together: Ballard’s time in Shanghai, his arrival in England and his settling in Shepperton, his studying of medicine, his siring of three children, his writing of Crash and Empire of the Sun…

There is an English-speaking narrator, who does quite a good job of impersonating Ballard, letting forth with some very well-chosen JGB quotes, the clack of a typewriter underpinning this prophecy of the ages.

We see what is supposed to be Ballard’s house; strange shapes and apparitions emanate from it.

Then Thomas appears to find himself in a Tarkovsky-style zone, and ‘Ballard’ tells us that:

Shepperton is nowhere, that’s its great appeal for me. There are film studios here, and it lies within the psychic catchment area of London airport so it expresses transience, classlessness, alienation and a complete lack of traditional reference points. It’s the way of the future.

Thomas, wandering aimlessly around Shepperton, interviews residents: an elderly lady shopkeep, a Lotus car salesman, a young guy playing snooker, who laughs when asked, ‘What is there to see in Shepperton?’ None of them mention Ballard or seem to know who he is; one chap, talking about ‘stars’ in the area, mentions Edward Woodward! These interviews are skilfully contrasted with Thomas’s own science fictional glimpses of the suburb, which suggest something altogether stranger below the surface of this placid riverside town. Although he gets no closer to meeting Ballard, he is beginning to hotwire the Ballardian signal directly into his frontal lobe. Then he is attacked and beaten by uniform-clad thugs, and the familiar front projections return, images of suburbia taking over from the real thing, and we are back in the zone again.

A French-speaking woman emerges, called ‘Karen Novotny’ no less — the name, of course, of the cypherwoman from The Atrocity Exhibition (all the weirdness is in French, appropriate since these sequences worm their way inside the brain of the Thomas character, who is of course from France). She informs Thomas that she and her sub-militia are attempting to wrest psychic control from Ballard, whom she calls ‘the Unlimited Dreamer’; the ‘whole city is controlled by the Unlimited Dreamer’s thought waves,’ she says.

Cut to more biographical detail. ‘Ballard’ intones, ‘We live inside an enormous novel’, which is the green light burning for more high weirdness, and we finally end up in the ‘psycho-geographic area of the first spaceport in America, opened in 2010′…

All up, this is an inventive short film, displaying considerable verve and skill, especially in its juggling of three separate time tracks: the story of Ballard, of Shepperton, of Thomas. Rather than trying to cover up the lack of budget, they’ve made a virtue of it, with the front projections standing in for unstable reality. I’m also assuming the crew actually did try to interview Ballard; rather than give up the film when that didn’t come off, they’ve weaved a story around his reclusiveness. Plus, the acting is really good — the actor playing Thomas does a great line in self-deprecation — the sound design and score is effective, and the film is faithful to the power of Ballard’s work. Rather than trying to intellectualise or contextualise Ballard, it presents his vision as ‘felt’, as experiential, as utterly mysterious as a multi-storey car park, as banal as a Shepperton high street, as transcendental as a pirate radio wave.

For Thomas Cazals, the power of J.G. Ballard’s writing is important for the transformation it wreaks on the everyday, for its power to remake the world in thrall to personal fulfillment. He is clearly in awe of the Seer from Shepperton, and has found a thoroughly unique way to parlay that into a tribute to the man. We might even be able to read the film as a parody of the typical starstruck fan who visits Shepperton hoping to catch a glimpse of his hero, and is mesmerised by the surrounding motorways and the dull suburban sheen that is now so recognisably Ballardian.

Recently, a reader commented elsewhere on this site:

Perhaps we have to take seriously the (diffused ambient) notion that Ballard’s writing really does access and stimulate previously un-tapped regions of the brain. A new organ, better fitted to understanding the monolythic psychological blandscapes of, eg. The Atrocity Exhibition (which is itself a cryptic blueprint for the construction of a unique time travel device). We have to do more deep theoretical R&D into Ballard: as fresh, varied, radical, and disturbingly alive as the source itself.

I’d say Cazals has done exactly that.

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ Shepperton’s Oracle.

Ben Noys has recently published two academic articles on Ballard’s work, both of which can be found online in some form. Included is an update of a specific piece of his that I posted here on Ballardian last year, entitled ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard/Ballard’. It’s been reworked to consider Kingdom Come in the scope of the argument, and the new version is available at the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. The other article, ‘La libido reactionnaire? The recent fiction of J.G. Ballard’, is an update — again to include Kingdom Come — of a paper Noys gave at the Sixth European Social Science History Conference in 2006. Although the new version is only available via subscription at the Journal of European Studies website, I recommend seeking out the newer piece (contact me if you want a copy).

I’ve always found the Baudrillard/Ballard symbiosis intriguing, and it’s good to see someone update it with regards to Ballard’s more recent work, rather than referring solely, as so often happens, to 16-year old arguments surrounding Baudrillard’s ‘controversial’ reading of Crash. Noys is insightful for the way he examines how each element of this ‘Beckettian “pseudo-couple” ‘ — Ballard-Baudrillard — explores the need for ‘hyper-trangression’ in a society in which cultural capital routinely produces its own drip-fed doses of ‘regulated violence’. He makes the salient point, however, that such an invocation of the ultimate crime (so memorably and shockingly revealed in Super-Cannes) risks sustaining the ‘system of simulation’, producing a simulated ‘alterity’ (defined by Baudrillard, according to Noys, as ‘Otherness, difference, and negativity in their radical forms’) that can be controlled and measured — “the melodrama of difference” in Baudrillard’s words.

Noys writes that

[s]uch melodramas include, in Britain, the continuing “debate” on the integration of asylum seekers, British Muslims, and the “underclass”. In this way alterity is given an identitarian form, at once threatening and open to neutralisation within the body politic.

However, rather than taking the usual line of critics of Baudrillard, who only see ‘absolute pessimism in the face of inescapable systems’, Noys ends by developing a different strand in Baudrillard’s work: its earlier, provocative suggestion that ‘becoming banal’ may just break this feedback loop. Noys uses Kingdom Come to effectively illustrate the point, highlighting its ‘self-criticism’ of Ballard’s most recent novels and their fascination with trangression, and the novel’s subsequent descent into a kind of entropic inertia that recalls his earliest fiction. In this sense, an indifference to the all-encompassing gaze of the spectacle might just break the ‘vicious circle of incitement’. I tend to agree: in an age of instant celebrity in which anyone at all can become a star — a process unconnected with outmoded notions of ‘talent’ or ‘skill’ — the end result is, as we so often see, a total trade-off in terms of psychological health, security and well-being. ‘Becoming banal’ is therefore not a bad strategy to undertake. Remaining anonymous, withdrawing, embracing obscurity — it may just be the most radical strategy anyone could hope to deploy.

Regarding the ‘La libido reactionnaire?’ article, note that my comments below refer to the updated version, in which Noys considers the vexed question of Ballard’s politics.

‘Is J.G. Ballard a reactionary?’ Noys asks, in light of France’s ‘New Reactionaries controversy’, in which the ‘subversive gestures’ of writers including Michel Houellebecq were accused of actually serving ‘the agenda of the right’ rather than the automatic assumption that they were left-leaning. Noys looks at ways in which Ballard’s work seems to be endorsing the ‘reactionary libido’, via Zizek’s formualtion of the ‘obscene underside of the law’, and the sense that Ballard’s recent work apparently upholds the ‘”rightist” admiration for those willing to do the dirty work’. That’s an interesting equation, and in this light I couldn’t help but think of Ballard’s ‘psychopaths-as-saints’ as having more than a little in common with film vigilantes such as Dirty Harry and the Charles Bronson character in Death Wish. However, Noys suggests that Ballard’s turn towards the crime and thriller genres in his later work suggests ‘that his interrogation of what passes for politics is also an interrogation of what passes for fiction… As he did with science fiction, Ballard reworks existing elements of a genre to produce a new form of work’.

Noys makes the excellent point, echoed here on ballardian.com on a number of occasions, that ‘while [Ballard's] work is recognized as provocative and controversial, this is neutralized through the construction of an ‘eccentric’ authorial persona’. Noys sees this reductive process as deriving from the success of Empire of the Sun and the way in which that book’s ‘biographical keys’ have nullified some of the more extreme conclusions reached in his other fiction, especially the disturbing — and unanswered questions — Ballard raises about ‘regression, sexual deviance and the role of violence and radicalism in the arts’ (to quote, as Noys does, Michel Delville on Ballard).

In the end Noys sees this nullification as a result of the stifling ‘constriction of the terms of literary and cultural debate in Britain’, and ends by calling for critical re-engagement with Ballard’s most urgent concerns. Although I’m not sure he ever satisfactorily answers the question, ‘Is J.G. Ballard a reactionary?’, ultimately I’m not sure he has to. His article opens up many productive lines of enquiry that hopefully will be picked up by future analysts of Ballard’s work (as he writes, critical engagement is the key), although, I fear, not by the lazy journalism that distils the Ballardian essence to the British public, neutering Crash, puffing up Empire of the Sun, and completely ignoring the vast body of work Ballard has produced in and around these two iconic tomes.

One final point: as much as I enjoyed these two articles, I am still waiting for someone to take up Roger Luckhurst’s speculation, that the academic tendency to produce ‘theorized versions’ of Ballard (especially Crash), by reading the work through Bataille, Lacan, Baudrillard and so on, is because

these theoretical interventions are in exactly the same avant-garde tradition as the text they ostensibly strive to “explain.”…[for example] Lacan and Ballard seem to me to make the most sense if they are understood as writing in the wake of Surrealism. Similarly, I think we might understand the affinity of Crash with many French poststructuralist thinkers by seeing them as the product of the same extraordinary era. Baudrillard turned savagely against his own commitment to Marxist critique in the mid-1970s, as did other radical philosophers like Jean-Francois Lyotard. (Luckhurst, ‘J. G. Ballard’s Crash’, Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed, Blackwell, 2005)

One for the future, perhaps.

Noys also edited the latest edition of Film-Philosophy, which has as its theme ‘Lacan and Film’; all articles are available online. I know just a little about Lacan, but I respond to Noy’s introduction best when he states, ‘All the essays take film seriously as a place in which change can be thought, while also engaging with the aesthetic and political choices of the films and filmmakers they analyse, as well as the constraints of contemporary image production — what Mark Fisher calls “cyber-capital” in his contribution’.

And it’s Fisher’s essay that I’m interested in for the purposes of this site. It’s an update of a post he wrote for his k-punk blog a while back, and it positions the film Basic Instinct 2 as an exercise in ‘preposterous excess…not immediately [suggesting] Lacan so much as a delirial commodity porn confection of James Bond, Ballard and Bataille … auto-erotic in the double, Ballardian sense’. Now, who can resist a come on like that? Not me.

Fisher goes on to explore how Basic Instinct 2 feels more like a sequel to Cronenberg’s Crash rather than the original Basic Instinct, providing the surprising detail that Cronenberg actually worked on the film in pre-production. None other than Sharon Stone, that ‘elegant bitch’, says that some of his traces remained, and Fisher uses that detail to ruminate on the film’s Ballardian appeal:

+ The name of the femme fatale, Catherine: ‘Even Tramell’s first name seems to be transformed into a reference to Ballard’s 60s and 70s work, in which ‘Catherine’ was a frequently recurring name.’
+ The film’s setting, a ‘phantasmatic, cybergothic London’, which, for Fisher, recalls elements in Ballard’s book that obviously were not to be found in the Toronto setting of Cronenberg’s film. As Fisher says, ‘Ballard’s principal area of interest has always been environment and architecture rather than technology: even the car in Crash functions not as a machine but as a screen on which fantasies can be projected and a scene in which they can be acted out.’
+ The film’s ‘erotics of the superficial’ with its emphasis on objects, on environmental elements, on clothing. Ultimately for Fisher, the ‘very Ballardian’ in this film is also the ‘very Lacanian’, in that the characters ‘such as they are, have no more depth than the buildings they move through or the clothes they wear.’

The rest of the essay detours via Baudrillard’s Seduction, ‘one of his most Lacanian works’, and takes in an analysis of the ‘ontological haemorrhage’ of the recent ‘news’ hysteria surrounding the missing McCann child, including the manner in which the story has been framed and reframed as if it was a live drama improvised on the spot for the TV cameras. This analysis is all very skilfully done (although perhaps Lacan is missing in action a little towards the end; I don’t have Lacanian chops so I would have liked a bit more detail on how the film relates to his work), and Fisher relates and returns it all back to Basic Instinct 2, the film, with its refusal to resolve its world, with its vision of ‘ultra-precarious cybercapital, whose endlessly weaving digital labyrinths resemble the dream work itself.’

Also of note is Fisher’s review of The Killing of John Lennon in the latest Sight & Sound, which includes the following observation:

The film works best as an analysis of assassination as plagiarism. Chapman appears as a kind of bad but spectacularly successful postmodern author, synthesizing his influences not into an act of artistic production, but of a murder, acting out in the (hyper)real what had previously only happened on the page and the screen. Chapman becomes Travis (whose name was itself a cinematic reference, to Mick Travis in If), stalking a New York transformed by Bickle’s misanthropy and misguided sense of mission into a sin city that can only be redeemed by a symbolic act of murder. Chapman declares that he didn’t only kill Lennon; he ended an era, the Sixties. Yet Chapman’s killing of the star can be seen as in many ways an attempt to revive the perverse montage of murder and megastardom that defined the Sixties. In J G Ballard’s definitive examination of the Sixties’ mediatized violence, The Atrocity Exhibition, the lead character (saturated in cinema and TV, and sometimes referred to as ‘Travis’) ‘wants to kill Kennedy again, but this time in a way that makes sense’. Chapman’s would-be redemptive act belongs to the same (patho) logic of ritualised violence inspired by, and taking place in, the media landscape. (Even the Dakota building is another cinema reference: Rosemary’s Baby was filmed there.)

Very effectively, both Fisher and Noys answer at least one of Luckhurst’s challenges (if not the one mentioned earlier), namely the call he sent out at the Ballard conference in May last year for Ballard to be ‘rescued from the novel’, a form with which, as Fisher has said on his blog, ‘Ballard is clearly bored’, suggesting that we need to locate new, non-literary ways in which his work might be interpreted and adapted.

Interestingly, I recently came across a review of Kingdom Come in the London Book Review that got me thinking about precisely that. This anonymous review analysis states that:

As Ballard’s reputation has risen, so too have the number of critics who look to his work for a critique of where we are going. Still worse there are those who seek to discern hidden themes and patterns in the real world, who look to Ballard to find the pulse of what’s going on in the world around us.

Ouch! I have a sneaky feeling this reviewer won’t like ballardian.com, then, for I’ve never made any secret that this site has two main themes: firstly, to celebrate and critique Ballard’s work, and then to also uncover the ‘Ballardian’ out there in the real world. I feel it’s a mistake to dismiss Ballard’s relevance as a cultural critic, and to engage in purely textual, psychological readings of his work. This again is in opposition to the review, which states:

Ballard’s best work provides an oblique view of the world that is informed by his own obsessive visions and neuroses. That this can sometimes illuminate aspects of the world is almost incidental – it is certainly not the point of his work. Perhaps [in Kingdom Come] he’s simply trying to hard to be the JG Ballard that the critics are looking for. Maybe it’s time to become the JG Ballard that his fans adore instead.

To me, Ballard’s many interviews, especially the ones from his glory years — the early 70s to the early 80s — demonstrate the eye of an exceedingly sharp cultural critic and the mind of a deeply engaged philosopher. At one stage, a long time ago, I convinced myself that I preferred his interviews to his fiction. The RE/Search collection is exemplary in this regard: probed by people with a serious interest in cultural production and the media landscape, Ballard responds with a never-ending stream of insight and observation that still amazes to this day. Also run your eye over the archival interviews with Ballard I’ve posted here on the site and also the examples collected by Rick McGrath.

It’s quite clear from these that Ballard draws inspiration from popular culture, from the mass effects of consumerism and capitalism. In interviews he test these concepts, extrapolating them to their logical (and sometimes illogical) conclusions, engaging in wildly speculative flights of fancy. As a final step he plugs the results of these road tests into the hull of his fiction, providing a streamlined, supercharged iteration. Finally, more often than not, these turbocharged vehicles prove to be extraordinarily prescient, and this, to my mind, is because Ballard is so throughly grounded in the nitty-gritty mechanics of the machinery of post-late capitalism — or ‘cybercapital’, as Fisher would have it.

Yes, there’s Freud, surrealism, the shock and awe of Ballard’s life and biography as determinate causes for the power of his work, but for me — and for many others — it’s that precise evocation of post-post-modernity that really sticks to the skin and that especially powers the throbbing engine driving his career. It’s not for nothing that the Collins definition of ‘Ballardian’ refers to the worlds depicted inside Ballard’s work, as well as the world outside, ie: ‘the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments’.

Sometimes the fiction and non-fiction blurs, loses its boundaries. Many bemoan the fact that Ballard no longer writes short stories, but I would suggest reading the many reviews and opinion pieces that have taken their place. Ostensibly rooted in real-world events, reality in fact provides a launching place for Ballard’s journalism to display as much imaginative insight as the best of his fiction: dreamy, evocative voyages into the realm of fantasy, sex and power. Reading Ballard’s recent piece on the Bilbao Guggenheim, for example, it’s impossible not to think of Cocaine Nights, perhaps Ballard’s most ‘architectural’ work, in which the built landscape guides the protagonist like some kind of artificial intelligence:

Novelty architecture dominates throughout the world, pitched like the movies at the bored teenager inside all of us. Universities need to look like airports, with an up-and-away holiday ethos. Office buildings disguise themselves as hi-tech apartment houses, everything has the chunky look of a child’s building blocks, stirring dreams of the nursery. But perhaps Gehry’s Guggenheim transcends all this. From the far side of the Styx I’ll look back on it with awe. (J.G. Ballard. ‘The larval stage of a new kind of architecture’, The Guardian, 8/10/07)

What I am trying to tell you, ultimately, is that Ben Noys and Mark Fisher are generating some of the most substantial and relevant commentaries around on Ballard’s work, bringing into sharper focus the insights of one of the most penetrating cultural critics around: J.G. Ballard. And they are doing this by breaking the frame, shattering the generic, policed boundaries surrounding Ballard’s fiction-theory.

I look forward to more.

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

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

DAY 1: Welcome, Catastrophe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAY 2: The Eagle(ton) Has Landed

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

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

DAY 3: This Argument Did Not Take Place

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

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

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

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

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

That was a wonderful note to end on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dominika Oramus. Grave New World: The Decline Of The West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard. University of Warsaw Press, 2007.

review by Rick McGrath

Dr Roger Luckhurst somewhat shocked the gathering of academics at last May’ first international conference on JG Ballard when he suggested all types of literary and cultural theories would find a productive home in Ballard’ open-ended fiction.

It may be somewhat ironic that Luckhurst then pulled out Grave New World and waved it at his audience, because Dominika Oramus’ new book on Ballard is based on the cultural theory that the West is in precipitous decline; her basic tenet in Grave New World is that since the end of World War II western civilization has been merrily racing down the Highway to Hell in a white Pontiac; and all the evidence you need that we’re quickly approaching that gate where Hope is the toll is available in the fiction of J.G. Ballard.

According to Oramus, it all started in 1932: Aldus Huxley published Brave New World, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of The West, and Arnold Toynbee began work on A Study of History. It was not until 1949, however, that Oramus’ theoretical bedrock would be laid in an essay Toynbee wrote called ‘The International Outlook’, in which he noted: ‘The self-inflicted wounds from which civilizations die are not those of a material order. In the past, at any rate, it has been the spiritual wounds which have proved incurable”. No, that’s not religious. In Toynbee’s vernacular, “spiritual” means “internal”.

There you go. For Oramus, “In both his fiction and non-fiction J.G. Ballard describes the dire spiritual changes that have been taking place since the war and have transformed the West”. That’s what this book is about.

It’s All In The ‘Scapes.

One of the most intelligent aspects about Grave New World is the way Oramus organizes her approach. The book starts with a lengthy Introduction in which she lays out her theme, pays polite homage to all the main Ballard critics, from Merrill to Gasiorek, and then offers up a fascinating account of how JGB has publicly remythologized himself over the years, finally emerging as an “orientalist” after the success of Empire of The Sun, novel and movie. Oramus successfully identifies the two main problems prior Ballard critics have faced: his “classification” as a writer, and his proclivity to continuously create and recreate his own public image. The former she dismisses by treating “all of his oeuvre synchronically, as descriptions of different vistas”, and the latter she negates by carefully explaining and then ignoring Ballard’s autobiographical fantasies, trusting the tale and not the teller in the main body of her book.

However, the 11 pages Oramus devotes to Ballard’s self-fiction are some of the most compelling in the book: “The impressions and descriptions of the contemporary world and post-modernist culture mingle with personal memories and ciphered allusions to his books. The devoted reader of Ballard is now faced with a maze of cross-referential allusions and remarks, which together form his imaginary autobiography”. Most of which has been dutifully collected and published by RE/Search Publications.

The next chapter, ‘Grave New World’, is equally interesting, although perhaps mistitled, as the content is a close study of Ballard’s intellectual themes and his theoretical sources. Oramus carefully begins with Huxley, and then moves to a discussion of historians Toynbee, Spengler and Gibbon and their theoretical influence on the young Ballard. Equally influential are concerns of the mind, and Oramus next examines the ideas of Freud, Jung, Laing and the Surrealists, and shows how they, Freud foremost, are essential to understanding Ballard’s fiction. She then moves to mass culture, and examines the ideas of McLuhan, Debord and Baudrillard before finishing the chapter with the weakest links: Toffler, Fukuyama and Huntington in their roles as dire warning futurists. Personally, I’ve never seen much of this trio’s influence in any Ballard, but Oramus probably included them because of their necessary role in her overall thesis of the spiritual (internal) death of the West.

The next five chapters are devoted to Ballardian themes: ‘Battlefields’, a study of war; ‘Cityscapes’, the urban landscape; ‘Mediascapes’, the mass media; ‘Mindscapes’, the inner world; and ‘Wastelands’, the entropic end.

Each of these important themes is intelligently discussed, with conclusions based on close readings of the major novels and short stories. ‘Battlefields’, for example, offers a look at war and violence as “one of the most important motifs in J.G. Ballard’s oeuvre, and surrender to aggression and the death drive are basic characteristics of his vision of contemporary culture.” Oramus treats us to revelatory readings of Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and The Atrocity Exhibition, ultimately linking war, violence and a human mind conditioned to self-destruction with Freud and the A-bomb as a turning point in history with Spengler, to bring it all back to her thesis of decline.

And so it goes through each chapter: a Ballardian landscape is analyzed through its fictional usage in various works, Ballardian sources are applied, conclusions are drawn; the point is made. Sometimes Oramus amuses us with an unusual reading of a Ballard classic, the most daring being her reading of Concrete Island as an hallucination by the protagonist, Maitland, during the seconds that elapsed between the accident and him dying behind the wheel.

On the other hand, in her reading of a lesser work, Day of Creation for example, while astutely recognizing the blend of media and memory Mallory uses to create his tale, she seems to miss the point of it being yet another variation in “creative” autobiography -– a story about writing a story — and veers towards the more sinister reading of the tale being a sign of the power of the media, and how visual culture ensnares its victims.

But this, of course, is the downside of Grave New World — it exists to prove an “external” point, and really, what could be easier than choosing Ballard to substantiate the Ballardian belief that our civilization is slipping into a psychopathological dystopia?

The problem is, a very great part of Ballard’s fiction is not pessimistic, but individually optimistic. Nor are his characters apparently even slightly concerned about changing what’s going on around them — all objects tend to be ciphers, anyway — and they tend to deal with their situations in highly imaginative (“spiritual”) ways that offer personal, not social, psychological relief. There’s also Ballard’s use of humour, which Oramus completely disregards. If we’re all in that Pontiac and Ballard’s driving, there’s a comedy CD playing intermittently on the stereo.

One other aspect of this book I found exasperating is the lack of novels and short stories in the Index. What? Yes… you can’t look up all the times, say, Crash is mentioned. There’s an index or listing for damn near everything else, but nothing for any of the books (Ballard & otherwise) Oramus mentions. Hopefully another edition will solve this serious oversight.

Grave New World is a sort of one-trick pony with ornate dressage. The whole decline of the West thing, although interesting and surely an idea with merit, does begin to pale after awhile, and Oramus almost seems to gloat slightly as she lovingly describes our culture’s long list of woes. It’s almost like complaining about teenagers. However, when she gets into the novels and stories her inner literary critic takes over, and she delivers up many satisfactory readings, links, insights and ideas about most of Ballard’s oeuvre, including, I might add, The Wind From Nowhere, in which we agree many of Ballard’s later stylistic ideas were developed.

What I personally appreciated most about Grave New World is Oramus’ work to establish Freud as perhaps Ballard’s greatest intellectual influence. Her outline of Freud’s Ballard-appropriate theories is clear and succinct, and should help any non-Freudian reader expand their appreciation of all Ballard’s work.

As well, her knowledge of Ballard’s “imaginary” self is extensive and illuminating. Perhaps no other modern writer has created such an extensive mock biography, which he no doubt created to hide behind — a concept Oramus chose not to follow in this work.

At the end of our civilization, I’d rate this as a bifurcated book. The thesis is basically subjective — are we really on the way out? — but the analysis is highly objective, relying basically on the source material. It’s well written, understandable, acknowledges the critical field, and develops a number of Ballardian themes in a way no other critic has attempted. Well worth reading, even if the end is nigh.

Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard has been produced in a limited quantity. If you’re interested in obtaining a copy, please contact Dominika Oramus at the University of Warsaw.

..:: MORE RICK McGRATH
+ Terminal Collection: Rick McGrath’s JGB site
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on JG Ballard’s Cover Art
+ It’s An Ad, Ad, Ad World: Rick McGrath’s review of Kingdom Come

Review by Rick McGrath

To mark this month’s release of Kingdom Come in paperback, former ad man Rick McGrath takes another look at KC from ‘the perspective of marketing, advertising and psychopathology’. He also takes a look at the Metro-Centre website, a viral-marketing tool used to promote the book, and asks, ‘The abattoir? Not too gloomy?’

If you haven’t read the book yet and need a taster, HarperCollins have helpfully onlined a PDF of the first chapter.

HAS the kingdom come to this? The marketing mavens at HarperCollins Publishers have gone “bad is good” and invented a fake Metro-Centre website in order to help promote sales of J.G. Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come.

Inspired by the novel and the adcap antics of its protagonist, Richard Pearson, “2006 UK Adman Of The Year”, this ersatz shopping centre has attempted to represent itself as revealed in the novel, with David Cruise interviews, St George’s shirts, maps, hours of operation, local news, sports — anything to enhance the illusion. Then, in June 2007, just before the release of the softcover HarperPerennial PS edition of Kingdom Come, they upped the ante. They kept the site’s flowery Metro-Centre sunflower background (which had already changed from 4C to B&W), but brutalized the bland logo into a reversed Helvetica motorcycle gang armpatch, and started running their own versions of Pearson’s psychopathic campaign, ironically attempting to foster consumer interest using irrational ads.

LEFT: David Cruise stands forlornly in an empty parking lot. Apparently we don’t have to wait much longer… one assumes the cars will soon arrive (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

Ahh… the joys of marketing: use an imaginary ad campaign to sell a real book about an imaginary ad campaign. You have to give them credit, for it’s a sad fact that Kingdom Come, in hardcover, was met with mixed notices from UK reviewers when it was published in September 2006. City critics know nothing of the suburbs. But now the publication of Kingdom Come, the softcover, offers an opportunity to re-examine the novel from the perspective of marketing, advertising and psychopathology … and the hidden message behind Pearson’s “ironic” ad campaign.

Pearson, remember, is a recently-fired and divorced advertising executive who leaves his London flat to venture out and into the suburbs to a town called Brooklands, off the M25 motorway, to finalize the estate of his recently-murdered father. Who killed dad? Turns out nobody really cares, and Pearson, dazed and confused in this unlandscape of the uncreative, stands out like a slogan without a brand, writhing in newly-felt emotions as he slowly learns the truth about his now ultimately estranged pater.

No matter. All this is just psychological background for Pearson’s main activity in the novel: unleashing his radical ad campaign for a stupendous shopping complex they call the Metro-Centre.

It takes awhile to get there, but Pearson’s psychotic proclivity to link product and buyer finally crashes into consciousness when he meets the very Ballardian Dr Maxted, a professor-like psychiatrist who loves to make summatory pronouncements and who introduces Pearson to the concept of “elective insanity” — psychopathologies which are “waiting inside us, ready to come out when we need it”. Maxted is always right and never wrong. Pearson falls instantly for this intellectual father figure.

So it’s no surprise that Maxted makes the telling prediction, lecturing Pearson that “the future is going to be a struggle between vast systems of competing psychopathologies, all of them willed and deliberate, part of a desperate attempt to escape from a rational world and the boredom of consumerism”. Hmm… hey, that’s a marketing concept: if rationality is prison-like and our only amusement is more of the boredom of going out to buy something useless, then maybe irrationality will free us and add some excitement to our lives… and perhaps make shopping a pleasure again! Helluva notion. For Pearson, this certainly is the basis of an advertising campaign. But which “competing” psychopathology to use?

Pearson knows the answer. His own self-doubts guide him. He’s already tapped into the power of “elective insanity”. In London, Pearson experimented with what he called a “strange” ad — unfortunately, the first campaign he tried it on worked so well he was fired. Full kudos for being brave, but the campaign for a new micro-car — “Mad is bad. Bad is good.” — dives into a pool of irony so deep as to confuse the public into buying the car and killing themselves by completing the slogan’s logic and concluding “mad is good”. And that is sophisticated London. This is not. Again happily undeterred by any thoughts of consequences, Pearson decides to reprise his radical concept: “Brooklands and the motorway towns were the ultimate consumer test panel, and here I could put into practice the subversive ideas that had cost me my career”.

What’s truly subversive about this campaign, however, is its deeper, latent meaning: this is not a campaign for the Metro-Centre, this is a campaign designed to tap the darkness of Pearson’s own unrealized psychopathologies. Oedipal guilt springs to mind. Too Freudian? How about emasculated male ego? No matter. The sublimation begins. In essence, Pearson unconsciously uses his campaign to advertise his own neuroses upon an already-restive society only too happy to consume the deviance of his “elective insanity”. Sounds bad, but once again the Ballardian character obsessively seeks to touch his inner self by dominating the external environment.

Charged with purpose, Pearson immediately gets to work. Not surprisingly, his deepest insight is right out of Freud: true capital is emotional — once you have their hearts, their wallets will soon follow. Once you have their Ids, their Egos will soon follow. Pearson explains to his newly-recruited pitchman, David Cruise, how this situation can be exploited: “People accumulate emotional capital, as well as cash in the bank, and they need to invest those emotions in a leader figure”.

If this is psychopathologic, David Cruise’s first emotions are anger and hate, possibly against an unidentified victim. The booze angle will become part of the campaign’s theme (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

But what kind of “leader figure” will the population invest in? Do they want a dictator whose specific message demands racial fears and violence? No, says Pearson. “There is no message. Messages belong to the old politics… No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want”. Hah, hah. Hardly. People consume what they’re given. Pearson’s anxieties require him to fictionalize his own psychopathogies. But how? For Pearson, that’s easy: use the irrational. “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.” Sneaky boy has been peeking at Mum again.

Once he’s concocted his concept, Pearson goes on to coach Cruise on how to pull off this acting job: “Be nice most of the time, but now and then be nasty, when they least expect it. Now and then slip in a hint of madness, a little raw psychopathology. Remember, sensation and psychopathy are the only way people contact with each other today.” Get the feeling Pearson is describing his childhood? That Cruise might be another kind of father-substitute … as well as Pearson’s projection?

For the media mix, Pearson chooses giant billboards and relentless TV commercials, along with a regular consumer affairs show on the Metro-Centre’s TV station. With this visual approach, and utilizing the appropriate “raw psychopathology”, Pearson re-creates Cruise as a “fugitive and haunted hero of a noir film … as a trapped creature of strange and wayward moods — grimacing, frowning, angry, morose, hallucinating and obsessed.” Pearson unwittingly describes himself.

Let’s see how Ballard captures these “wayward moods” in Pearson’s ads. The novel describes two billboards and six television commercials. A sophisticated marketer, Pearson has designed a campaign which builds on itself through evocative scenes, each slightly more deviant than the last. They are indeed as zany and irrational as Pearson, although he later calls them “ironic soft-sells”, which is in itself a masterpiece of self-delusion.

Billboard #1: Cruise as a “fugitive and haunted hero”, sitting at the wheel of his car, staring ahead at the open road, “and whatever nemesis lay in wait for him.”

Billboard #2: Cruise in a “nightmare replay of a Strindberg play”, threatening and confused as he stares across a showroom of kitchens.

TV Spot #1: Cruise staring “almost ecstatically” at a beat-up garbage can.

In TV Spot #2: Cruise rings doorbells at random, and when the housewife answers the door, he scowls at her as if to hit her, or beg a place to stay.

TV Spot #3: Cruise “haunting” the Brooklands racing circuit and his mind being “tortured” by squealing tires.

TV Spot #4: Cruise following a group of schoolgirls across a Heathrow concourse “like a would-be child abductor.”

TV Spot #5: Cruise howling from the roof of a multi-storey car park.

TV Spot #6: Just hinted at, but apparently the action takes place in a slaughterhouse. Pearson asks: “The abattoir? Not too gloomy?” And is answered: “Never. Existential choice.” So fraught with death one hardly needs to know the plot.

As with all great campaigns, these advertisements build on each other in such a way that, “Together they made sense at the deepest levels, scenes from the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their mind.” Unfortunately, that collective dream turns out to be the physical reality of senseless violence, complete with fascist tendencies.

Our man Cruise doing the Strindberg play thing in a showroom with washers and TVs. Today we’re just a little suicidal… (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

Pearson himself calls these ads “tense but meaningless psychodramas”, but of course the “meaning” is in the tension itself — with Cruise a kind of subhero of Pearson’s subconscious. It’s Dr Maxted’s “elective insanity” dressed up in noir. No longer trapped in their civilized cage of guilty repression, the populace of Brooklands quickly responds to Pearson’s siren call of the instincts and gleefully embraces the Metro-Centre’s call to consumerism … and darker action.

Does the campaign work? Of course, and only too well. Unfortunately, the results are similar to Pearson’s car campaign — increased sales and increased violence. The population of Brooklands, already primed by a spectacle diet of aggressive sports and nationalist mobbing, rush to spend their emotional capital: Cruise achieves celebrity status, Metro-Centre becomes a self-contained church of consumerism, the cash registers ring, and all is outwardly well in Happy Valley. By day. By night Brooklands reflects the dark side of Pearson’s psychopathic campaign. His deep guilt and sexual anxieties are reflected in the street crowds around him. These basic instincts rule the streets and sports stadiums; the individual becomes a mob, and the situation becomes dangerous.

The ad man’s moment of self-realization comes as he’s driving the streets. Reflecting on the violence around him, Pearson muses: “I saw myself as taking part in a merchandising scheme in a suburban shopping mall, using a ‘bad is good’ come-on that was meant to be the ultimate in ironic soft sells. I had recruited a third-rate cable presenter and some-time actor to play the licensed jester, the dwarf at the court of the Spanish kings. But the irony had evaporated, and the slogan had become a political movement … The ad man was faced with the final humiliation of being taken literally.”

A humiliation, indeed -– and the turning point in the novel. But, just in case we still don’t get it, Ballard neatly sums it up. In a meeting between Pearson and Dr Maxted, we finally reach analytic ground zero.

Dr Maxted: “You saw fascism as just another sales opportunity. Psychopathology was a handy marketing tool. David Cruise was your tailor’s dummy … a psychopath with genuine moral integrity.”

Pearson: “Still, everyone admired him.”

Dr Maxted: “Why not? We’re totally degenerate. We lack spine, and any faith in ourselves. We have a tabloid world-view, but no dreams or ideals. We have to be teased with the promise of deviant sex. Our gurus tell us that coveting our neighbour’s wives is good for us, and even conceivably our neighbour’s asses. Don’t honour your father and mother, and break free from the whole Oedipal trap. We’re worth nothing, but we worship our barcodes. We’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach. We’re so desperate we have to rely on people like you to spin a new set of fairy tales, cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt.”

Whoa. So much for English culture. But this pessimistic view is, of course, the reason for the novel in the first place. In an ad, ad, ad world, you get what you psychopathologically deserve.

Cruise’s moment of ecstasy with a beat-up garbage can. The overturned shopping trolley is a nice touch; the billboard was posted in Shepperton (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

Without a doubt Richard Pearson is an interesting addition to the stable of unstable Ballardian characters. He enters the novel a typically damaged professional, emasculated by his wife, fired from his job, and looking for the killer of his alienated father. Lost in this unfamiliar landscape, Pearson transforms it by transforming himself, rewriting his nightmares into an ad campaign of irrationality, which he survives and emerges from as a physically damaged but mentally healthier and wiser individual. Whew. And he gets the girl. And yes, she’s a mother figure.

Ultimately, Pearson’s cathartic campaign comes across as Ballard’s real advertisement for his version of a well-balanced life. Pearson’s failure becomes his salvation. If the Metro-Centre campaign is an externalized, artistic version of Pearson’s inner psychological state, then his recovery comes with its ultimate self-destruction. Once again Ballard confirms his longstanding theme of personal affirmation by following one’s obsessions. Through Pearson, Ballard creates his own extreme advertisement for personal and social redemption: Turn your back on the tabloids. Grow a spine. Have some faith in yourself. Go after your dreams. Have some ideals. In other words, get a life.

In a real way, Kingdom Come the novel is an advertisement itself: read it as a very long print ad warning about the real dangers of subversive dreams when they’re carpet bombed on empty lives. Oh yeah, and admen are crazy. You’ve been warned…

Rick McGrath

..:: MORE INFO
+ Rick McGrath’s J.G. Ballard Collection
+ Ballardian’s interview with Rick McGrath
+ More on Kingdom Come
+ Metro-Centre website

I attended From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard at the University of East Anglia on the weekend, and I’m suffering a bit of a comedown. I always get a bit melancholy when these temporary autonomous zones collapse and everyone returns to virtual communication. Especially when said TAZ was so inspiring. I already knew the quality of discourse would be outstanding – one look at the conference abstracts could tell you that – but after meeting and greeting, listening and absorbing, I was left overwhelmed with happiness centred around the feeling that Ballard might, finally, be receiving the level of critical attention his work so blatantly deserves.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on that score, though: I’m carrying with me the Lonely Planet Guide to Great Britain, where, in the literature section, Ballard does not score a mention, yet Will Self and Martin Amis do! Will Self, a man who has repeatedly outlined his literary debt to Ballard… I know some of the people who wrote this guide, so I’ll be having a word in their shell-like, don’t you worry about that.

At the conference, my own paper was on micronationalism and the vocabulary of secession in Ballard’s work, specifically the types of autonomous enclaves he has written about since his very early career, and the political potential of these ‘non-places’. I focused on how the later works — from Cocaine Nights onwards — were explicitly concerned with defending physical space, a process that leads to the actual secession of the Metro-Centre as a ‘shopping republic’ in Kingdom Come, and I tracked the simultaneous real-world successes and failures of actual micronations, such as Sealand and the Hutt River Province. This of course was a direct result of my role as a co-author of Lonely Planet’s recent guide to Micronations, but I’ll hopefully be posting the essay here next week, so I’ll spare any further explication for now.

For me, there were numerous highlights enfolded within the two days of the conference. Dan O’Hara‘s paper, ‘Reading Posture and Gesture in Ballard’s Novels’ was among them, with its deft analysis of the angle at which Ballard’s dialogue deflects away from the physical expression of the characters, destroying Realism with judicious reference to cybernetics. Dan’s engaging style and crystal-clear explanation of terms and concepts was compelling. Joanne Murray delivered another outstanding analysis, looking at two exhibitions from the Early Independent Group, Growth and Form (1951) and Parallel of Life and Art (1953), and exploring how these art works prefigured the collage and ‘spinal landscape’ approaches of The Atrocity Exhibition. Backed up with a visual display and her poised manner, Joanne thrilled us all with a connection previously unexplored by Ballard scholars.

The UEA’s Ziggurat: Ballardian Concentration City (photo: Simon Sellars).

Pippa Tandy’s slideshow presentation, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Call Sign of Sputnik 1′, expanded upon the cold war themes that have previously preoccupied her work, continuing her unique archaeology of the imaginative strata underpinning some of Ballard’s most formative writing. On the same panel, Umberto Rossi delivered a poignant examination of war themes in The Kindness of Women, and was especially pleasing for making a case for Kindness as an underrated Ballardian masterpiece. I couldn’t make it for the third paper from this panel, David Ian Paddy’s ‘Empires of the mind: Autobiography and anti-imperialism in the work of J.G. Ballard’, but I made up for it: in the taxi to the pub on Saturday night, I coaxed the Welsh-speaking Mr Paddy into reciting the first line from Crash — in Welsh…’Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash’…

I also missed John Carter Word‘s presentation, ‘Going Mad is their only way of staying sane: The Civilised Violence of J.G. Ballard’, but I was assured by others that it was a cracker, with its approach to representations of violence shaped by Norbert Elias and certain strands of evolutionary psychology.

Two other papers I really desired to hear but was unable to (because they were on at the same time as my own) were Jeanette Baxter’s ‘Visual Geographies: Surrealist anti-colonial poetics and politics in The Crystal World’, and Rick Poynor’s ‘Visualising Ballard: Representation, Misrepresentation and the Graphic Image’. As this recently published paper makes clear, Jeannette is breaking new ground with her examination of Ballard’s surrealism, and I’m eagerly anticipating her forthcoming book on that very topic. Rick Poynor has of course appeared here on Ballardian, so naturally my anticipation was piqued, but no matter; he was kind enough to lend me More Dark than Shark instead, the rare, out-of-print book on the artwork of Russell Mills and the early lyrics of Brian Eno, for which Rick supplied five essays. As luck would have it, I have Eno’s first four albums (covered by the book) with me on this trip and I’ve been obsessively listening to them and reading More Dark… ever since the conference, when I should have been looking out at the English countryside from my train and bus windows, or scouting Ballardian multi-storey car parks instead.

I appreciated Mark Williams’ paper, ‘The Underground Exhibition: A Ballardian Animadversion of Ballardianism’, as it explored a period I’m quite interested in: the period of New Worlds magazine when Michael Moorcock was editing it and Ballard was writing for it. Mark was engaging for the way in which he let his imagination wander a bit, straying away from rigid academic discourse and into entertaining speculation, with a surprising diversion into Lovecraft territory. Mark Fischer’s ‘Masoch after Ballard’ was as dynamic, dark and as engaging as you’d expect from the k-punk himself, and drew on some of the themes he explored here on Ballardian in his piece on Steven Meisel. I’m drawn to Mark’s work; the symbiosis with the aims of this site is, I think, obvious. I missed the other speakers on Mark’s panel, but judging from the question time, where Jennifer Hui Bon Hoa dominated with her smart and lengthy observations, she would have had some incandescent points to make in her paper, ‘The Pornography of Abstraction in The Atrocity Exhibition’.

The UEA’s Speed Control Ramp: A Code-song from the Quasars telling me to calm my speedy nerves before delivering my paper (photo: Simon Sellars).

On my own panel, Owen Hatherley‘s paper, ‘Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse’, was a bright, extremely clear-headed analysis of the affirmative nature of Ballard’s future, especially Vermilion Sands. I also enjoyed Sebastian Groes’ paper, ‘Kicking the Dog Will Do: Ballard’s Unhuman London’, for its original assessment of schizophrenic ‘urban semiotics’ in Ballard’s mapping of orbital London, and for the fact that Sebastian ad-libbed one of the weekend’s best lines: ‘If I had a pound for every time someone mentioned the word ‘psychopathology’ at this conference, I’d be a very rich man’. The other word that would have made him a fortune was ‘Gasiorek’, as in Andrzej Gasiorek, the scholar whose superb volume on Ballard’s work was quoted by seemingly everyone, including me. And seemingly, everyone had a different pronunciation, too, which was amusing; in the end, I plumped for Gas-syee-rek. Is that OK? As for Ballard’s books, Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, as you’d expect, were by far the most referenced. However, on the same panel as Sebastian, Alistair Cormack’s ‘The Unlimited Dream Company: Blake and Ballard’ was notable not only for its skilful negotiation of the themes of one of Ballard’s most neglected works, contrasting it with Blake’s poetry to reveal a dark, ‘cannibalistic’ element in the book not found in most reviews, but also for the manner in which it was delivered, with Alistair’s passion oozing from every flourish of his hands, from every flick of his hair, from every look from under his glasses. A joy to listen to, and to watch.

Away from the panels, I responded to the first roundtable discussion, where Roger Luckhurst outlined how Ballard has perhaps transcended literature, suggesting that it’s up to all of us to locate new, non-literary ways in which he might be interpreted and adapted. This thrilled me, naturally – as anyone who’s read this blog would gather, that’s pretty much my mission – and it’s a relief to know I’m not working in isolation. In the second ’roundtable discussion’ (well, they weren’t really, considering each participant stood up and delivered a paper, like the rest of us), Raymond Tait’s work was brilliant, based on his trip back to Ballard’s alma mater, King’s College, Cambridge, and his interviews with some of Ballard’s school friends. This yielded some surprising results, including a possible model for Vaughan in Crash: none other than the school bully whom Ballard had befriended, and who later died in a — wait for it — car crash. Raymond delivered with wit and style, and his biographical trip was a needed break from the hardcore theory of the rest of the weekend. On the same panel, it was also nice to hear David Pringle speak, and to meet the man who was profiling and championing Ballard at a time, in the mid-1970s, when most people were not.

I provided myself with other breaks by wandering around the UEA grounds and the ziggurat halls of residence, in particular, a series of pyramidical, mirrored structures ringing a lake and woodland, resembling nothing less than a Ballardian Concentration City. All around, the Brutalist architecture was superbly integrated into art and aesthetic, into functionalism and living, so much so that I thought a garbage skip was in fact an art work along the lines of the industrial sculptures dotted around the grounds. There was a swarm of rabbits darting around my legs, too, and hundreds, maybe thousands of interconnected rabbit holes – an animal kingdom version of the ziggurat – and one couldn’t help but compare these hyperactive beasts to the usual activities of university students after a few lagers.

More ziggurat hi-jinks (photo: Simon Sellars).

On top of all this, we had the indefatigable Rick McGrath running around filming absolutely everything that moved, including my jetlagged eyes during my paper, and no doubt all two days of conference footage will end up on his website at some stage. Rick was the kid-in-a-candy-store JGB fanboy, providing North American-style comic relief in among the career academics, beginner intellectuals and hardcore Ballard biographers. Rick, by the way, is exactly the same in real life as in his emails; Umberto Rossi, by contrast is not, being more soft-spoken and courteous than his online, rough-house ‘hoodlum intellectual’ persona. I wonder how my own two personas compare?

Finally, many many thanks to Jeannette Baxter, the charming, accommodating conference organiser, and to everyone who helped and attended for a really top-class way to spend two days. Apparently, there will be a two-volume publication of the papers at some stage in the future, and I’m very much looking forward to reading the ones I missed and to revisiting my time in Norwich via the time travel of the printed word.

PS: There was only one wild-animals-in-the-high-street joke made at my Aussie expense: take a bow, L.J. Hurst!

PPS: Over the next few weeks, I’ll be travelling around Britain and hopefully visiting some of the micronations I’ve been writing about, as well as stopping in Dubai – the Ballardian city of the future – on my way back to Oz. There will be a few postings here on Ballardian, but the majority of this travel writing will appear on Sleepy Brain, so also check that in the month of May if you feel so inclined.

..:: MORE INFO
+ ‘Ballard in Anglia’: Owen Hatherley’s conference wrap-up
+ ‘Nightmares at Noon’: John Carter Wood’s review of the conference
+ Various posts about the conference at the JGB Yahoo group

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

review by Umberto Rossi

This serious, well-documented academic book-length essay on James Graham Ballard and his oeuvre is nearly exhaustive, given that Gasiorek hasn’t paid sufficient attention to Ballard’s short stories (even though the Man is — more than anything else — a master of the short form who also writes very good novels).

But even so, it’s an excellent starting point, definitely better than Luckhurst, who sometimes gets entangled in a web of academic querelles and almost forgets what Ballard actually wrote, and Delville, who offers a very good introduction to the writer, yet not the wealth of information and insights and interpretations that you may find in Gasiorek.

Gasiorek’s Introduction is a general survey of JGB as a writer, and deals with his connections to surrealism, technology, sexuality and apocalyptic imagery — the “hot” issues in the interpretation of such masterpieces as Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, and so on. Gasiorek’s language is academic and “technical”. His reasoning is always sound, and though people with no academic background might find some terms unfamiliar (but could easily find them in a good dictionary or on Wikipedia), they won’t get lost in discussions that have only a tangential relevance to Ballard (something which unfortunately often happens in Luckhurst). Basically Gasiorek is always on target, and when he introduces surrealist painters and French philosophers it’s always because the text itself asks for them.

The first chapter, Cryptic Alphabets, deals with Ballard’s apocalyptical novels, from The Wind from Nowhere to The Crystal World. The first, purely SF part of the Man’s career is carefully analysed – it’s not the typical academic journal article written by a PhD student who has only read Crash.

The second chapter, Deviant Logics, describes Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, and offers a better analysis of Atrocity than Luckhurst, and a more detailed one than Delville. Gasiorek’s reference to the mass-media and surrealism are illuminating; and when he “uses” Deleuze and Debord, he explains Ballard — he doesn’t unduly complicate him.

The third chapter, Uneasy Pleasures, discusses the rest of Ballard’s production in the 70s: High-Rise and Concrete Island first and foremost, plus his neglected masterpiece ‘The Ultimate City’ (Ballard’s postmodernist rewriting of The Tempest) and The Unlimited Dream Company. Here the main issue is urban spaces and the horrors of modernist city planning (or urbanism) — the destiny of metropolises all around the world. Gasiorek finds interesting connections among these works, and clearly outlines the growing importance of Shepperton as Ballard’s stage for the urban tragicomedies he will later write.

The fourth chapter, The Destructive Element, focuses on Ballard in the 80s — from Empire of the Sun to Running Wild — the transition from Ballard’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece to his current Shepperton-centered fiction. Unfortunately Gasiorek skips The Day of Creation, one of Ballard’s (deservedly? undeservedly?) forgotten novels. Yet he has much to say about Empire and The Kindness of Women, and his reading of Running Wild through the lens of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is absolutely brilliant.

This leads us to the last chapter, Exhausted Futures, devoted to Ballard’s most recent works: Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Millennium People (but not Kingdom Come, obviously), with the — I reckon — deliberate omission of Rushing to Paradise. Here Gasiorek delves deep into the field of globalisation and late capitalism, drawing from Marx and (lo and behold!) a veteran cold warrior like Eddie Luttwak. He also resorts to Nietzsche, but he never gets unfocused or redundant: his remarks and comments are always aimed at understanding what is really behind, or in between the pages, of these “quasi detective” novels. Gasiorek is particularly precious here because he deals with recent works by Ballard that haven’t been explored yet by academic criticism, thus opening inroads that will be valuable to future commentators and readers alike.

Then there is a coda, Violence and Psychopathology, which meditates on the key concepts in Ballard’s oeuvre and takes it all back to Uncle Conrad — always a good idea.

All in all, this is a necessary book for those who want something more than the pure pleasure of reading Ballard — it’s a very good starting point for serious, professional, and well-written Ballard criticism. Again, the only shortcoming is the occasional attention paid to Ballard’s short stories; but it should be clear that this is not such a shortcoming as to annihilate what good Gasiorek has achieved in his essay, which is definitely a lot. The book is endowed with a bibliography of Ballard’s book-length works (be they novels or collections) and a rich critical bibliography.

This is the book any Ballard critic needs to have on the shelf above his or her desk. It’s the book any student who wishes to write a paper or a dissertation on Ballard should read first.

Umberto Rossi

—————————————————————
…:: BUY FROM AMAZON
+ J.G. Ballard Andrzej Gasiorek
+ The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard Roger Luckhurst
+ J.G. Ballard Michel Delville

When film adaptations of J.G. Ballard’s work are discussed, Crash and Empire of the Sun are always mentioned but never Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition. Now, thanks to the Dutch film company Reel 23, we can see what Weiss was up to — they’ve recently released this buried work on DVD (and it’s a beautiful piece of packaging, too, filled with cut-up imagery and a revealing essay on the film’s genesis from Weiss himself).

According to Fright Site, the film “was shot over a two-year period in a number of disparate locations, from junkyards to abandoned military installations to the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art. It was initially completed in 1997, but reedited from a near two-hour running time down to 105 minutes for screenings at the 1999 Slamdance and 2000 Seattle Film Festivals”.

OK. So what’s it all about, then?

>>> EXCLUSIVE Read Ballardian’s fire-breathing interview with Weiss, in which the director responds to this review.

DVD information
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Sound: English 2.0
Region: 0, Pal
Subtitles: Dutch, French, German and Spanish
Duration: 80 min
Price: 24.99 euro
Extras: Audio commentaries by J.G. Ballard and Jonathan Weiss

Lead Actors: Victor Slezak (Travis, The ‘T’ Figure); Anna Juvander (Karen Novotny; The Woman in White); Michael Kirby (Dr Nathan)
Director: Jonathan Weiss
Director of Photography: Bud Gardner
Screenplay: Jonathan Weiss & Michael Kirby, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard
Producers: Robert Jason; Jonathan Weiss
Music: J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus)

REVIEW BY Andrés Vaccari

First published in 1969, J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition is a demanding text to read, let alone to translate into film. Rather than a ‘novel’, Atrocity Exhibition consists of a series of short fragments, which Ballard described as ‘condensed novels’, and which were published separately over a period of four years.

Centred on a psychiatrist undergoing a mental breakdown, the book deals with media violence, psychological alienation, the death of affect, and the dark unconscious drives shaping the technological environment. It expounds the now-renowned Ballardian thesis that the barrier between interior dreamscapes and the outside world has collapsed in our hyper-mediated and manufactured world. For fans of Ballard, the book is significant as a preview of themes that would later be unpacked in more depth, and with more success, in novels such as Crash and High-Rise. Although it provoked much controversy on its publication, Atrocity would most certainly have been forgotten or become a minor cult curiosity if it wasn’t for the fact that Ballard wrote it, and that it provides another perspective on his remarkable artistic vision.

The main problem with the book, and with Weiss’s film adaptation, is the outdated cultural references that saturate it: Marilyn Monroe, Nixon, the Vietnam War, etc. The strength of the rest of Ballard’s work is that it’s not set in any specific era; at best, his novels and stories mostly take place in an allegorical near future that blends with the present. The locations, for that matter, are mainly symbolic (the obvious exceptions here are Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, and to a lesser extent Millennium People). This imbues Ballard’s worlds with their characteristic interiority and topicality. It’s also the same quality that makes Kafka’s nightmarish worlds still resonate with us, the fact that they take place in their own tome and space.

It’s hard to justify Weiss’s decision to stick so faithfully to the book, especially since so much has happened since the late sixties, and its cultural icons and motifs don’t have the resonance they once did. Examples from, say, the Gulf War, the death of Princess Diana or modern advertising would have rendered much more effectively the prophetic nature of Ballard’s intuitions, as well as reinforce the themes of Atrocity. Weiss sometimes does use some more contemporary footage (most notably, from the Challenger disaster), so why not take the same liberty with the rest of the footage? In an age where we can watch surgical procedures on reality TV, the old footage of plastic-surgery procedures and Vietnam war atrocities seem strangely quaint, not to say banal and self-conscious. Perhaps the modern world has become too Ballardian for this film to tell us anything that we can’t learn from an average afternoon on television.

Another big problem with this adaptation is the nature of writing in general, as opposed to that of film. In writing, Ballard’s clinical descriptions convey the pornographic and violent nature of scientific rationality. This does not translate well into film. For Ballard, writing is, among other things, a space in which to reflect on the nature of media images, and take some distance from them. His style often parodies scientific or pornographic texts, as much as media imagery. But how do you reflect on media images with media images?

On the page, Ballard’s obsessive, solipsistic dialogue can be poignant and humorous. When spoken by actors, it sounds preposterous, and often unintentionally funny. A description of a surgical procedure might acquire an unexpected poetic tone on the page; on the screen, a surgical procedure looks just plain repulsive and pointless. The book can also be read at random; flicking through the pages, the reader can make his own novel (a bit like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch). In the film, one is trapped into a linearity that clearly conspires against the spirit of Ballard’s original.

The Atrocity Exhibition is well crafted and beautifully photographed, although the images cannot successfully outweigh the aimlessness. Individually, the images work, but the overall effect is flat and contrived. Nonetheless, as a first feature film, it’s an impressive effort, showing great focus and marking Weiss as a unique talent. Another standout feature is the music by Jim Thirlwell (aka Foetus), which lends great atmosphere to the images.

The film’s extras include a running commentary by an enthusiastic and indefatigable Ballard, in conversation with the director. This in itself is worth the price of the DVD.

Overall, Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition is a nice cult object – and perhaps an interesting failure.

– Andrés Vaccari

MORE INFO
>>>>>> Read Ballardian’s exclusive fire-breathing interview with Weiss, in which the director responds to this review and all the other critics who’ve dared to cross his path.
>>>See Reel23 for bios of Weiss and Ballard; a Director’s Statement; and letters from Ballard to Weiss praising the film; a trailer from the film; and information on how to order the DVD.

Review of JG Ballard: Conversations (ed. V Vale, 2005) and JG Ballard: Quotes (selected and edited by V Vale & Mike Ryan, 2004).
Published by RE/Search Publications

V Vale has been an underground publishing icon in San Francisco for quite some time, kicking off with late-70s ‘punk tabloid’ Search and Destroy (America’s equivalent of Sniffin’ Glue, the legendary British punkzine) and founding RE/Search Publications from there. RE/Search is quite the exotic beast, with a backlist of large-format books covering William Burroughs, Brazilian psychedelic lounge music, piercing and scarification, ‘angry’ female performance artists, ‘industrial culture’, and reprints of memoirs of sideshow freaks and sado-masochistic rituals.

In the 1980s RE/Search was also responsible for two lovingly detailed volumes on JG Ballard; for many admirers of Ballard’s work, the RE/Search editions have long been the ultimate reference. The first volume, simply entitled JG Ballard, was refreshingly free of the academic jargon that renders inscrutable most other works on the writer; instead, Vale and his RE/Search team compiled a portrait of Ballard that located him within a steaming cauldron of pop-culture references and real-world applications, detecting the Ballardian effect in music, film, politics and mythology. But the real goldmine was the 40-odd pages of interviews, in which Vale and people like industrial musician Graeme Revell quizzed Ballard on all this and more.

All parties clearly enjoyed each other’s company; there was a palpable sense of Ballard letting his hair down and relaxing before the critical gaze of a new and unknown source – an American audience – for Ballard was considered pretty much a cult author in the US before RE/Search came along. Vale upped the ante with RE/Search’s subsequent publication of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s then-out-of-print classic collection of experimental short stories, first assembled in the 1960s. The RE/Search reprint added a few new ‘Atrocity’ pieces, enlisted Phoebe Gloeckner to provide some surreal, provocative illustrations of internal organs and medical processes, and topped it off with annotations by Ballard himself…it still holds up as a beautiful piece of independent publishing, 15 years on.

Left: photography by Tim Chapman, from JG Ballard: Conversations

In 2005 things are very different. The world has cottoned on to Ballard: he’s critically accepted; films have been made of his books; he’s won awards; he’s quoted in major newspapers; he’s about as ‘cult’ and as ‘underground’ as Sir Michael Phillip Jagger. But unlike Jagger, Ballard’s worldview is still sublime, still relevant, and still has the capacity to jiggle the old grey matter. Back in the 1960s, if you’d asked most science fiction ‘heads’ which writer’s vision would reign supreme in the early 21st century – Ballard’s or Arthur C Clarke’s – it’s unlikely the majority would have picked the ‘difficult’ and ‘experimental’ Jimmy Ballard. But think of the death of Princess Di; September 11; reality TV; the London bombings; the breakdown of civilisation after Hurricane Katrina…if you know Ballard then you understand this is his world.

And that’s probably why Vale has decided to revive the seemingly dormant RE/Search empire with the publication of two new Ballard books: JG Ballard: Quotes and JG Ballard: Conversations. It’s a great opportunity to evaluate how this maverick futurist has stood the test of time. JG Ballard: Conversations consists of lengthy interviews with Ballard, conducted by the RE/Search crew and derived from all the untranscribed recordings RE/Search made with Ballard from 1983 to the present. Now, when writers begin to pontificate and interpret their own work, there is a risk that they will ruin everything. Samuel Beckett, for example, was wise enough to keep his mouth shut. Thomas Pynchon just refuses to even come out, wherever he’s hiding. Their work has benefited from this, retaining a certain aura of mystery that opens it to various readings and reinterpretations. But Ballard’s interviews and occasional essays are often as devious and slippery as his fiction. They have offered a fascinating complement to his work, and a glimpse into his creative process.

With Conversations, though, you need to bear in mind that these really are ‘conversations’, rather than interviews. They read like straight transcripts, with all the meanderings of real conversations, and that is both a strength and a weakness: it’s a lovely indicator of the character, warmth and empathy of the man, but it doesn’t really throw any new light on Ballard’s previous utterances. Although the future (our present, that is) has become Ballardian in many ways, it would be unfair to judge Ballard’s work in terms of how accurately he predicted things; that was never the point. Nonetheless, some of the man’s judgments are a little naive. For example, he states that George Bush is not a media manipulator, that there’s no media image of Bush, and that he doesn’t engage our emotions (p. 204-5); the most sophisticated thing Ballard has to say about the War on Terror is that the media is manipulating you. Elsewhere, the writer admits he doesn’t follow politics, saying that when the papers called him wanting to know his thoughts on 9/11, he didn’t have any thoughts (p. 53). These are quibbles, though; Ballard is always immensely readable, whether in conversation or in his writing, and at all times he comes across as the ideal quirky, weird uncle we would all love to have (in the dark hidden folds of our reptilian sub-cortex, of course).

Although it’s fair enough that RE/Search wouldn’t want to commission new interviews, a slightly frustrating aspect of Conversations is the fact that the questions are coming from the usual suspects: Vale, Revell, Mark Pauline – the same voices heard in RE/Search’s original Ballard volume. It would have been interesting to read the fruits of contemporary writers and artists grappling with Ballard, although a bonus is the conversation with David Pringle, the writer’s longtime ‘archivist’ and Number One Fan.

For the ultimate Ballardian experience, the Quotes volume is the pick, being a concentrated compendium of Ballard’s observations and admonishments, mixing quotes from interviews and excerpts from his fiction: dense, poetic, and oblique aphorisms that don’t stray too far from familiar Ballardian territory: flight, art, the Space Age, gated communities, car crashes, airports, photography. These are the subjects Ballard feels most comfortable with, and his observations are truly insightful. ‘One wonders,’ Ballard muses, ‘if photography is the Cyclops eye of the late 20th century, recording everything but seeing nothing’. Quotes is fantastic for dipping into: on the toilet, on the bus, at the office, in bed, on a plane – anytime you need a fix – and both Quotes and Conversations are in a handy, slightly-less-than-A5 format, perfect for slipping into your handbag and whipping out as required. Vale calls Quotes a ‘handbook for deciphering the future’, and that’s pretty accurate. JG Ballard’s imagination can still kick you in the guts and is perhaps best read in compressed chunks like these; Atrocity Exhibition, after all, was the ultimate example of packing dense meaning into tiny frames.

All up, Vale and RE/Search have done a fine job with these publications. They’re shot through with striking urban and industrial-landscape photography and some interesting cover choices: garish and colourful, evoking old-skool 50s sci fi (for such a forward-thinking, prescient writer, these covers are perhaps a little odd). But all you really need to know is that both books are infused with that unmistakable Vale touch: unpretentious, eclectic, smart. Over the years, Ballard has had a fine shadow in Vale; let’s hope it’s not so long before RE/Search is activated again.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>< <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

JG Ballard: Conversations (ed. V Vale, 2005)
JG Ballard: Quotes (selected and edited by V Vale & Mike Ryan, 2004)
Available from RE/Search Publications

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>< <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Nothing sorts memories from ordinary moments. They claim remembrance when they show their scars.

Chris Marker. La Jetée.

review by Simon Sellars

The films of Chris Marker are often termed ‘essayist’, participating in a phenomenological play with deep roots in French intellectualism. Working within documentary and pseudo-documentary modes, they mimic the manner in which memory and desire flash from cell to cell – randomly, instantaneously, elliptically.

La Jetée is perhaps the most ‘fictional’ of Marker’s output, weaving its story of a nuclear-devastated Paris in the near future; it is far from conventional. Lasting 29 minutes, shot in black and white and consisting almost entirely of still photographs – imaginatively blended with dissolves, wipes and fades – this is the bare bones of science fiction. It highlights why we are attracted to SF in the first place: not for bug-eyed aliens or galaxy-hopping spaceships, but for the way in which the form can twist our most cherished versions of reality inside out. Indeed, La Jetée belongs to a fascinating epoch in French alternative cinema, when a number of directors engaged with SF as a philosophical tool. Its concept of circular time and ‘Chinese box’ narrative recall Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) as well as Jean-Pierre Gorin’s fascinating, but failed, attempt to film Philip K Dick’s Ubik.

La Jetée‘s prologue depicts a young boy watching passenger jets take off from the jetty at Orly Airport. There is a commotion and he sees a man fall to the ground, shot and killed. A distraught woman also witnesses the scene.

Flash-forward to the aftermath of World War Three: Paris is in ruins as a ragged band of survivors hole up underground. Here we meet our unnamed protagonist, a shell-shocked citizen who has been selected by scientists to test a new time-travel technique. He is to visit the Paris of the far future and ask for assistance – food, medicine, technology – so that the planet may be rebuilt.

He is sent to the past on a trial run: the scientists know he has a deep-rooted memory from that time that will cushion the shock of ‘awakening, fully born, into another age’. It is of the Orly jetty, and the woman; he was the little boy. Our protagonist has grown up with the indelible image of her face and her vulnerability, and has fallen in love with her.

Time-travelling, he meets the woman. They share an intimate bond, as if they have known each other all their lives. They spend days, weeks together – and then he disappears, plucked from his reverie. The scientists send him to the future, where he is given a power supply to reignite the world’s industry. Upon his return, he is to be liquidated as he can be of no further use. But the denizens of the future transmit to him: ‘Join us’. He refuses their offer, instead asking his new allies to transport him once again to peacetime Paris and the woman who awaits him. They grant his wish.

He is at the Orly jetty. He sees her, runs to her – and notices an assassin from the underground camp. He is shot dead. The woman watches the murder, as does… (but it would be improper to reveal the film’s final, astonishing twist here. You must see it for yourself and realise the utter futility of our hero’s dream.)

This is a familiar synopsis, given that David and Janet Peoples used La Jetée as the foundation of their screenplay for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. As are most of Gilliam’s films, Twelve Monkeys is a sublime, brooding masterpiece – but it is not La Jetée. For Marker puts the vast majority of big budget SF to shame.

La Jetée‘s lead actors (Hélène Chatelain and Davos Hanich) are beautiful and doomed, as is Trevor Duncan’s score; and the resonant, measured narration (from Jean Negroni) is poetic and fluorescent, infused with awe and mystery – even when subtitled into English. However, like all time travel stories, La Jetée doesn’t make much sense; but then again, time and memory do not make ‘sense’, at least when articulated by a technology as arbitrary as language.

Rather, La Jetée‘s virtue is its immediate, haunting ability to evoke the emotions of love and desire; its use of photomontage poignantly conjures up the frozen moments that constitute memory. As the man remembers his past, and the woman, he relives it – never really sure if he is sent or if he is dreaming – one snapshot literally coming alive with his subjective colouring. The familiar SF framework is merely a narrative hook by which Marker hangs this essay on Inner Space.

La Jetée‘s influence is palpable. In a 1966 review for New Worlds magazine, JG Ballard considered it to be one of the few convincing acts of SF cinema, while a scene from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – in which a photo of Rachel’s ‘mother’ animates for a second – is a direct homage to the truth and beauty at the core of this film (Blade Runner was co-scripted by David Peoples, and is famously about the unreliability of memory).

Our memories haunt us eternally, morphing and evolving through time so that we are constantly revisiting them, triggering them, repressing them; time-travelling to the past, so to speak, and projecting them into the future; confronting and modifying past, present, future versions of ourselves, family, lovers. This, then, is the subject matter of La Jetée, a minimalist masterpiece affording us an all-too-rare glimpse at the paradoxes and complexities of perception and the subconscious.

But an artificial exercise such as this can never do justice to the film. Finally, it must be experienced.

– Simon Sellars

CLICK HERE FOR MORE PHOTOS FROM AMPLIFICATION.

Amplification
A book of photographs by Jeff Busby.
3 Deep Publishing
ISBN 0-9580508-2-1

Review by Andrés Vaccari

This handsome and hyper-glossy coffee table book concerns the unpleasant subject of automobile accidents. It’s impossible, of course, to put out a book of photographs of wrecked cars without thinking of JG Ballard; in this regard, Amplification makes a good companion piece to Crash. But Busby’s collection of photographs deserves to stand on its own as a stark meditation on the pleasures and perils of one of the key technologies of modern times.

The pictures were taken at night. A mournful atmosphere pervades over these dismembered, abandoned machines. They look serene, almost like they are sleeping; yet their dreams are full of violence, still reverberating with the aftershock of death. There is no text whatever to accompany the images, and the desolate close-ups of shattered glass, panels and dashboards hold no traces of human presence. I found myself searching closely for traces of blood or other organic matter, any remnant that may bespeak of what happened to the missing victims. But nothing. The very configuration of automobile interiors, ergonomically designed to tightly accommodate the human body, seems to amplify the absence of these (presumably dead) bodies.

The photos are seductive and unsettling, almost pornographic. The paper is thick and sleek, underscoring the brash colours and shadows, delineating the crisp and cutting contours of crushed glass and skewed chrome. The choice of plastic, glossy paper adds a tactile dimension to the whole experience. It feels almost like vinyl.

Busby simultaneously invokes the stylised aesthetics of everyday hi-tech and the brutal ‘autogeddon’ taking place right under our noses. Readers of Crash may recognize the same dialectic fuelling Ballard’s prose, its hypnotic mingling of fascination and horror, its aloof poetic descriptions of the mundane urban apocalypse. Ballard exploited automobile accidents as a perfect metaphor for the logic of modern technology. Our cities have incorporated them into the overall technological system. In a way, our deaths have already been planned, risk-managed, integrated into the equation and codified into the urban landscape.

The automobile is a powerful cultural figure that embodies individualism, the implosion of time and space — all the liberating promises offered by triumphant ideologies of technology. It’s a machine that has coevolved with the city and directed the course of urban development, deeply shaping our lives in the process. In fact, nowadays modern cityscapes cater more for cars than for human beings. The automobile accident is the cemetery of all these dreams.

A certain cryptic logic suggests itself, a kind of technological unconscious. For all the planning and analysis that supposedly goes into the rational management of the technological systems that support us, the automobile acts as an extension of our irrational side. The car is a prosthetic shell that paradoxically exposes our egos and instincts, amplifying and releasing them from the usual social protocols. Automobiles tune into the repressed currents stirring beneath the surface of our minds—the frustration, violence, anxiety, or plain boredom and distraction.

Amplification is a must for that Ballardian coffee table, and a worthy addition to the genre of techno-porn.

..:: End
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