With the sad news of Elizabeth Taylor’s passing, the time seems right to review the appearance of this enigmatic actress across a significant chapter in Ballard’s work, spanning the publication of the experimental story ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1966) through to the notorious Crash (1973). What did Taylor represent to Ballard? Less a sex symbol and more an emblem of the parallel landscape that celebrity culture in the 1960s and 70s inhabited, a virtual reality colonising the private lives of ‘ordinary’ people exposed, through mass communications and on a hitherto unprecedented scale, to a world as strange as an alien planet yet paradoxically erotic and near – a synthetic substitute for reality itself.

Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition – to which the patients themselves were not invited – was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell.’

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, first published in New Worlds, September 1966, collected in The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970.

‘Eniwetok and Luna Park’ may seem a strange pairing, the H-bomb test site in the Marshall Islands with the Paris fun-fair loved by the surrealists. But the endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything) did have a carnival air, a media phenomenon which Stanley Kubrick caught perfectly at the end of Dr Strangelove. I imagine my mental patients conflating Freud and Liz Taylor in their Warhol-like efforts, unerringly homing in on the first signs of their doctor’s nervous breakdown. The Atrocity Exhibition’s original dedication should have been ‘To the Insane’. I owe them everything.

Ballard, annotations, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.

‘This reluctance to accept the fact of his own consciousness,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘may reflect certain positional difficulties in the immediate context of time and space. The right-angle spiral of a stairwell may remind him of similar biases within the chemistry of the biological kingdom. This can be carried to remarkable lengths – for example, the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Much of Travis’s thought concerns what he terms “the lost symmetry of the blastosphere” – the primitive precursor of the embryo that is the last structure to preserve perfect symmetry in all planes. It occurred to Travis that our own bodies may conceal the rudiments of a symmetry not only about the vertical axis but also the horizontal.’

Ballard, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, 1966.

Elizabeth Taylor was staying at the Hilton during the shooting of Cleopatra, when she contracted pneumonia and was given a tracheotomy. The Hilton’s balconies remind Travis of the actress’s lost gill-slits (which we all develop embryonically as we briefly recapitulate our biological past).

Ballard, annotations, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.

[Traven in The Atrocity Exhibition] is offering a substitute for emotions, which are difficult to describe in words because they’re so powerfully visual. He’s offering a kind of ongoing drama; dramatic tension takes the place of emotions, spatial awareness takes the place of emotions, the unity of apparently disparate things – balconies on a Hilton Hotel, and the operation scars on Elizabeth Taylor’s throat after her tracheotomy – these have a clear relationship, and Traven is offering these relationships to take the place of emotions. So that we are no longer constrained by our appetites and fears, but have a much more expansive and open sense of a world where everything is connected to everything else by a new kind of algebra, a new kind of geometry. And that’s very evident I think in the film.

Ballard, from a conversation between Jonathan Weiss and Ballard on the commentary track for Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition, 2006.

Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital – the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives, the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Yet Margaret Travis’s role was ambiguous. In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape.

Ballard, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, 1966.

Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the old-style Hollywood actresses, has retained her hold on the popular imagination in the two decades since this piece was written, a quality she shares (no thanks to myself ) with almost all the public figures in this book – Marilyn Monroe, Reagan, Jackie Kennedy among others. A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever. The public dream of Hollywood for the first time merged with the private imagination of the hyper-stimulated 60s TV viewer. People have sometimes asked me to do a follow-up to The Atrocity Exhibition, but our perception of the famous has changed – I can’t imagine writing about Meryl Streep or Princess Di, and Margaret Thatcher’s undoubted mystery seems to reflect design faults in her own self-constructed persona. One can mechanically spin sexual fantasies around all three, but the imagination soon flags. Unlike Taylor, they radiate no light.

A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol’s screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while his day-glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book.

Ballard, annotations, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.

13. Dali: “After Freud’s explorations within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which will have to be quantified and eroticised.” Query: at what point does the plane of intersection of two cones become sexually more stimulating than Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage?

15. Query: does the plane of intersection of the body of this woman in my room with the cleavage of Elizabeth Taylor generate a valid image of the glazed eyes of Chiang Kai Shek, an invasion plan of the offshore islands?

Ballard, ‘Notes From Nowhere: Comments On Work In Progress’, New Worlds, October, 1966.

As I said in one of my stories, the body of a screen actress like Elizabeth Taylor, which one sees on thousands of cinema hoardings, thousands of advertisements every day, and on the movie screen itself, her body is a real landscape. It is as much a real landscape of our lives as any system of mountains or lakes or hills or anything else. So therefore I sought to use this material, this is the fictional material of the 1960s.

Ballard, quoted in Jannick Storm, ‘An Interview with JG Ballard’, Speculation no. 21, February 1969.

At the gates of the film studio Dr Nathan handed his pass to the guard. ‘Stage H,’ he said to Koester. ‘Apparently it was rented by someone at the Institute three months ago. At a nominal charge, fortunately – most of the studio is disused now.’ Koester parked the car outside the empty production offices. They walked through into the stage. An enormous geometric construction filled the hangar-like building, a maze of white plastic convolutions. Two painters were spraying pink lacquer over the bulbous curves. ‘What is this?’ Koester asked with irritation. ‘A model of SQRT(-1)?’ Dr Nathan hummed to himself. ‘Almost,’ he replied coolly. ‘In fact, you’re looking at a famous face and body, an extension of Miss Taylor into a private dimension. The most tender act of love will take place in this bridal suite, the celebration of a unique nuptial occasion. And why not? Duchamp’s nude shivered her way downstairs, far more desirable to us than the Rokeby Venus, and for good reason.’

Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur. In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew , the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived.

Ballard, ‘The Great American Nude’, first published in Ambit 36, Summer 1968, collected in The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had appeared in stage versions of Faustus and The Taming of the Shrew , typecasting for both, especially Burton, who had the look in his last years of a man who had made the devil’s bargain and knew he had lost – but drunk or sober, he was always interesting and sympathetic.

Ballard, annotations, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.

In the first study, portions were removed from photographs of three well-known figures: Madame Chiang, Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Kennedy. Patients were asked to fill in the missing areas. Mouth-parts provided a particular focus for aggression, sexual fantasies and retributive fears. In a subsequent test the original portion containing the mouth was replaced and the remainder of the face removed. Again particular attention was focused on the mouth-parts. Images of the mouth-parts of Madame Chiang and Jacqueline Kennedy had a notable hypotensive role. An optimum mouth-image of Madame Chiang and Mrs Kennedy was constructed.

Ballard, ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’, first published in Ambit no. 31, Spring 1967.

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan’s body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.

Could she see, in Vaughan’s posture, the formula of the death which he had devised for her? During the last weeks of his life Vaughan thought of nothing else but her death, a coronation of wounds he had staged with the devotion of an Earl Marshal. The walls of his apartment near the film studios at Shepperton were covered with the photographs he had taken through his zoom lens each morning as she left her hotel in London, from the pedestrian bridges above the westbound motorways, and from the roof of the multi-storey car-park at the studios. The magnified details of her knees and hands, of the inner surface of her thighs and the left apex of her mouth, I uneasily prepared for Vaughan on the copying machine in my office, handing him the packages of prints as if they were the instalments of a death warrant. At his apartment I watched him matching the details of her body with the photographs of grotesque wounds in a textbook of plastic surgery.

In his vision of a car-crash with the actress, Vaughan was obsessed by many wounds and impacts – by the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbrake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.

At the conclusion of the questionnaire the last of Vaughan’s victims appeared. Elizabeth Taylor stepped from her chauffeured limousine outside a London hotel, smiled across her husband’s shoulder from the depths of a rear seat.

Thinking of this new algebra of leg-stance and wound area which Vaughan was calculating, I searched her thighs and kneecaps, the chromium door frames and cocktail cabinet lids. I assumed that either Vaughan or his volunteer subjects would have mounted her body in any number of bizarre postures, like a demented stunt driver, and that the cars in which she moved would become devices for exploiting every pornographic and erotic possibility, every conceivable sex-death and mutilation.

The clear equation he had made between sex and the kinaesthetics of the highway was in some way related to his obsessions with Elizabeth Taylor. Did he visualize himself in a sexual act with her, dying together in some complex car-crash? During the mornings and early afternoons he followed her from her hotel to the film studios. I did not tell him that our negotiations to feature the actress in our projected automobile commercial had fallen through. Vaughan’s hands moved through small contortions as he waited for her to appear, fretting around the rear seat, almost as if his body was unconsciously miming in fast motion hundreds of acts of intercourse with her. I realized that he was assembling in disjointed form the elements of a conceptual sexual act involving the actress and the route she would take from the studios at Shepperton. His self-conscious gestures, the grotesque way in which he hung his arm out of the car, as if about to unscrew it and toss the bloody limb under the wheels of the car following us, the rictus of his mouth as he framed his lips around a nipple, seemed to be private rehearsals for a terrifying drama unfolding in his mind, the sex act he saw as the climax of his own death-collision.

Ballard, Crash, 1973.

To be quite honest, I myself have no desire to die in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor [laughs]. I once nearly bumped into her in a revolving door in a London hotel and that was close enough. [Laughs.]

Ballard, quoted in James Verniere, ‘A Conversation With J.G. Ballard’, The Twilight Zone, June 1988.

[Elizabeth Taylor] wasn’t my type. A pity. But she is the last of the oldstyle Hollywood stars.

Ballard, quoted in Paul Di Filippo, ‘Ballard’s Anatomy’, Science Fiction Eye, 1991.

In [Crash], Elizabeth Taylor had an emblematic role. I wasn’t that interested in the actual actress, but she stood for the last of the great Hollywood stars.

Ballard, quoted in Andrew Hultkrans, ‘Body Work: Andrew Hultkrans talks with J.G. Ballard’, Artforum Magazine, vol. XXXV, no. 7, March 1997.

Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person – John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Together they helped to form the culture of celebrity that played such a large role in the 1960s, when I wrote The Atrocity Exhibition.

Ballard, Author’s Note, The Atrocity Exhibition, 2001.

After Robert Anton Wilson, my 2010 goal is to “create the happiest, funniest, most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with my brain signals”. And so the following is probably of no interest to anyone but me…

But here goes, anyway: for 2009, ballardian.com’s top 10 most-read posts, search terms leading to the site and links from other sites:

TOP 10 MOST-READ POSTS ON BALLARDIAN.COM FOR 2009
(Note that most of these are old posts, and, surprise, surprise: the X-ray porn comes in at no. 1; there’s depravity also at no. 5, 6 & 10. Good to see urbanism and film posts making a strong showing, too.):

1. ‘The fusion of science and pornography’ (WARNING! Exceptionally unsafe for work) – 1 July 2008

“Wim Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray art echoes The Atrocity Exhibition and the illustrations of Phoebe Gloeckner. WARNING: this post is indisputably unsafe for work. No, seriously: you have been warned.”

2. Coming Never: Richard Gere as Blake – 7 May 2008

“Aside from the films of Empire and Crash, Ballard has had almost all his novels optioned for the screen at some stage. Suitors include Richard Gere, Samuel L. Jackson, Jack Nicholson, David Frost and a trio of scantily-clad cavegirls.”

3. Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon – 10 August 2007

“Although little known, Harley Cokliss’s 1971 short film Crash!, based on passages from The Atrocity Exhibition, has something even more prized, something else the Cronenberg and Spielberg adaptations could never have: it stars J.G. Ballard. With his brooding, hypermasculine presence, Ballard plays a version of Atrocity’s ‘T’ character alongside Gabrielle Drake, her own role a composite of the book’s archetypal ‘sex-kit’ women.”

4. Michael Jackson’s Facelift – 2 July 2009

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

5. Dead Models – 31 October 2007

“A photo shoot for America’s Next Top Model, on the subject of dead girls. The judges’ comments have to be seen to be believed.”

6. Triple Transgression – 26 December 2007

“This disturbing photo feature focuses on peeping toms in Japan and Kohei Yoshiyuki, the photographer who documented them in the 1970s.”

7. ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear – 24 December 2008

“Nic Clear leads the remarkable Unit 15 course on the built environment at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. In this interview, Nic explains the course’s focus on the work of Ballard as a way to counter the lamentable state of current discourse on architecture. The article includes clips of six stunning films produced by students as part of this Ballard-inspired methodology.”

8. Crown Casino: ‘A snarling, digitised mutilation’ – 27 May 2009

“Simon Sellars, Mel Chilianis and Melb Psy take an audiovisual tour of Melbourne’s Crown Casino, seeking to map the coordinates of this micronational zone — consumer-driven control space with a raging need.”

9. R.I.P. JG Ballard, 1930-2009 – 20 April 2009

“Goodbye, Jim…”

10. Love Among the Mannequins – 15 January 2008

“Here’s a new campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. But it doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling? Note the photographer: none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel.”

TOP 10 MOST-FOLLOWED LINKS TO BALLARDIAN.COM FROM OTHER SITES:
(surprise: no porn)

1. http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace/index.php?a=469
2. http://www.jgballard.com
3. http://www.planetaki.com
4. http://www.metafilter.com
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Come_(Ballard_novel)
6. http://www.facebook.com
7. http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=7221
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard
9. http://twitter.com/ballardian
10. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org

TOP 10 SEARCH-ENGINE TERMS LEADING VISITORS TO BALLARDIAN.COM:
(very surprised at the paucity of porn, also that ‘ballardian’ beats ‘jg ballard’)

1. ballardian
2. jg ballard
3. gabrielle drake
4. ballard
5. medical fetish
6. make love
7. computers internet blog
8. concrete island
9. ballardian.com
10. atrocity exhibition

J.G. Ballard in front of his abandoned billboard novel, 1960. Photo: Mary Ballard.

J.G. Ballard’s first professional job as a writer came when he was just 22 years old — as a copywriter for the London-based advertising agency Digby Wills Ltd. He remembers writing ads for a company called Pure Lemon Juice in the three or four months he was employed there, but no doubt the restricted creativity of copywriting didn’t appeal to the young and restless Ballard, and his career next veered into the eat-what-you-kill occupation of door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. From fruit to nuts. But one must assume something about print advertising’s combination of truncated text and stylized design must have had some underlying influence on the young Ballard. His fascination with the structure of advertising — an idea neatly contained in a stylized box, exuding promises of fulfilled desires — and the advertising man himself (both Crash and Kingdom Come feature admen as protagonists) crops up regularly in Ballard’s work from 1958 onwards. One can even trace this interest back to Ballard’s Shanghai youth, where, sharing his interest with the cinema, radio, and comic books, he has repeatedly told the story of his fascination with glossy American magazines and their otherworldly pitches for big cars, washing machines and sexy fashions. The aesthetic of the advertisement appears again and again in Ballard’s work, and it may be informative to examine these ersatz works in detail.

Ballard’s earliest experimental work to include elements of advertising, ‘Project For A New Novel’ (1958), was influenced by the groundbreaking ‘This Is Tomorrow’ Pop art exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. And while Ballard claims Pop art and artists had no influence on the commercial fiction he wrote in the late 1950s, the work he did on ‘Project’ reveals he was strongly affected by that exhibition’s interest in collage and the artistic use of everyday or found objects — in this case, the words, text, charts and page layouts of the scientific magazines he edited.

It’s still unclear why so many elements of ‘Project For A New Novel’ resurfaced years later in his breakthrough inner space short story, ‘The Terminal Beach’, and the condensed novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. If Ballard actually knew — and he maybe he didn’t — he wasn’t telling. After all, this is a writer who is fascinated by the mediascape and who thrives on ambiguity and what he calls ‘open-ended’ stories. ‘I wasn’t satisfied just by writing SF stories’, Ballard told David Pringle in 1982. ‘My imagination was eager to expand in all directions.’ [1]

ABOVE: Detail from J.G. Ballard’s ‘Project for a New Novel’ (1958).

And expand it did. ‘Project For A New Novel’ — ostensibly an entire novel reduced to resemble two-page magazine spreads — was designed as an ad to be posted on billboards. As Ballard himself describes the ‘Project’:

“(These are) a series of four facing-page spreads that were specimen pages I put together in the late 50s… sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes… The pages from the ‘Project For A New Novel’ were made at a time when I was working on a chemical society journal in London, and the lettering was taken from the US magazine Chemical and Engineering News — I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories from Chem. Eng. News to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalized by the headings around them.” [2]

Rarely, if ever discussed by Ballard scholars, ‘Project For A New Novel’ remains a kind of curiosity today, a collection of names and themes of interest to those who seek out connections between it and the later works, and those who attempt to fill in its blanks and construct the semblance of a plot from its various components. ‘Project for a New Novel’ was designed to be published on a billboard, however, and as such, had it ever been produced, might have been the first instance of art being published on outdoor media. There was an instance in the late 1960s when Canada’s N.E. Thing Company, founded by Iain Baxter, attempted to publish a line of poetry by placing a word on a billboard in each of Canada’s major cities, thereby constructing a poem 3,000 miles wide, but in both instances, however, Ballard and Baxter’s message surely would have confused or bored almost all of those who observed it. Why? For Baxter, a lack of information; for Ballard, ironically, a lack of time. Our inability to understand the ‘message’ of Project as an ad is not simply a function of the abstract quality of the piece, but because of the severe technical restrictions of billboard media.

LEFT: Image by Rick McGrath.

Designed to be viewed from moving cars (Ballardian in itself), billboards offer the advertiser the benefits of a very large message, but the disadvantage of greatly reduced viewing time. Three to five seconds is the average length of time an individual has to scan a billboard, and this feat has to be accomplished in moving traffic. In order to compensate, successful billboard ads rely on strong, simple visuals and to-the-point messages. No one is going to drive around the block for a second view. It immediately becomes apparent that ‘Project For A New Novel’ breaks these rules by its sheer volume of words and complex, unbalanced layout — as well as the fact it seems to make no sense, offers no brand, no benefits, and no indication of how to respond. But that may be the point, as ‘Project’ is a quasi-surreal piece vaguely reminiscent of the ‘cut-up’ technique used by W.S. Burroughs. This same technical problem was identified by Ballard’s friend and Ambit editor, Dr. Martin Bax, ‘Most of the text you can’t read because when you see things on billboards you don’t read the small print, so the text is deliberately blurred — you can only read the headlines and some remarks.’ [3]

In a September 2008 letter discussing the work, Ballard said, ‘I gave some pages [of Project] away… and then, sadly lost interest — the “fictional” elements were pure stream of consciousness, the first thing to come into my head. I clipped and scissored away.’ [4] Looked at this way, the only real correlation between ‘Project’ and actual billboards is its shape — a correlation that, as we shall see, is developed and expanded to include content in Ballard’s later advertisements.

Ballard’s next foray into the world of advertising came in January 1963 with the publication of the short story, ‘The Subliminal Man’. This story is influenced by Vance Packard’s 1957 tell-all, The Hidden Persuaders, a highly popular book which attempted to reveal advertising’s use of psychological techniques — from motivational to subliminal — to induce an irrational desire for products. ‘The Subliminal Man’, however, is not about advertising. It is concerned with the effects on society of an ‘over-capitalized industrial system’ which requires ever-increasing levels of production and consumption, and is willing to use simple, direct subliminal commands to herd the unsuspecting population.

LEFT: Image by Simon Sellars.

Advertising itself is not overtly critiqued as the society Ballard portrays has no choice of product — there’s only one ‘brand’ of everything — and the subliminal message is not ‘hidden’ within an existing ad. It is interesting to note, however, that the medium chosen by Ballard to deliver this barrage of subliminal commands is again the billboard — appropriate for this culture, which is dominated by cars and the fact that fully one-third of the land space is occupied by roads. ‘The Subliminal Man’ is a warning about what might happen in a state with a fascistic need for increased consumer activity — a theme Ballard would revisit many years later in Kingdom Come — and the point of the subliminal message in this story is not to sell specific products, but to ‘spur’ the populace into increasing productivity and production through ever greater consumption.

Ballard’s next project is the five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ he created and published from 1967 to 1971 in Ambit magazine. According to Ballard:

‘Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising — I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was and still am Prose Editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me…’ [5]

While it’s interesting to note that Ballard emphasizes the fun he had in repeating all the steps in the actual production and dissemination of the ads — the craftsman aspect of designing, blockmaking and delivery — Ballard’s five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ are not far from the more ‘creative’ ads produced by agencies in the late 1960s, when the emphasis on target groups shifted from war-shocked parents to the leading edge of war babies, from traditional middle class concerns to the newly affluent and psychedelic youth culture. In appearance they most resemble a collage poster — a billboard on end — that may have been created out of Ballard’s original idea to have The Atrocity Exhibition done as a book of montage illustrations: ‘I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork — a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.’ [6]

ABOVE: ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’. One of Mike Foreman’s illustrations for the abandoned illustrated version of The Atrocity Exhibition.

However, they are print ads, although not in the same sense that ‘Project For A New Novel’ is a billboard. They are designed in the usual picture-headline-text layout used by ad agency art directors in the late 1960s, and close inspection reveals an intellectual concept behind the set, although it is not apparently obvious and, in fact, requires the consumer to view all five ads to receive the ultimate message. In July 1968, after he had already begun the series of ads, he told Jannick Storm:

‘It occurred to me about a year ago that advertising was an unknown continent as far as the writer was concerned… I had a number of ideas which I could fit into my short stories, my fiction in general, but they would be better presented directly. Instead of advertising a product I would advertise an idea… I’m advertising extremely abstract ideas in these advertisements, and this is a very effective way of putting them over. If these ideas were in the middle of a short story people could ignore them… But if they’re presented in the form of an advertisement, like one in Vogue magazine, or Life magazine, people have to look at them, they have to think about them.’ [7]

In actuality, these ‘ideas’ were already in his Atrocity Exhibition stories, as we shall see, and one could argue about their overall effectiveness, given the fact most people don’t think of an ad as an artistic puzzle they have to ponder to grasp. And when Ballard says advertising is an ‘unknown continent’, his own ads reveal the extent of his explorations, as well the heads of exotic animals he’s caught along the way.

ABOVE: ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ (1967): JGB’s first ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ is a coded message written in the Euclidian symbols of atrocity exhibitionese and comes complete with a promise of four future ‘announcements’, revealing, perhaps, that Ballard has already planned the project to conclusion. In this first ad, Ballard eschews a headline in favour of a real head and reduces all to a tightly cropped closeup of Ms Churchill’s smiling face. All that intrudes on the art is a downplayed copy block which links her to Abraham Zapruder and Ralph Nader — icons of high conceptual value to Ballard. ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ was published in Ambit in July, 1967, and it borrows copy from ‘The Death Module’, simultaneously published in New Worlds and later re-named ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. In the short story the copy obviously doesn’t include any references to Ms Churchill, but the section in which it is found — ‘Pentax Zoom’ — expresses Trabert’s attempt to understand the deaths of the three American astronauts in the ‘equations, gestures and postures’ of Karen Novotny who, in the preceding chapter, appears to be a modulus of domestic bliss: ‘Their period in the apartment together had been one of almost narcotic domesticity. In the planes of her body, in the contours of her breasts and thighs, he seemed to mimetise all his dreams and obsessions.’

This ad also seems to have roots in the chapter entitled ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, first published as a short story in the September 1966 edition of New Worlds, with Ballard’s advertisement almost an extension of that story’s section, ‘The Enormous Face’, with Ms Churchill replacing Elizabeth Taylor as the object of Ballard’s ‘private and public fantasy’ — this ad supplying the ‘public’ part. One can barely miss the concept at work here: ‘In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape.’ Substitute Ballard for Travis, and Ms Churchill for the actress, and it appears this is a poster disguised as an advertisement that is really a love letter. The emphasis on the eyes, and the rhetorical question that follows (‘At what point does the plane of intersection of these eyes generate a valid image of the simulated auto-disaster, the alternate deaths of Dealey Plaza and the Mekong Delta’) admits Ms Churchill to the conceptual world where she provides ‘a set of operating formulae’ for Ballard’s ‘passage through consciousness’. But just what might these operating formulae be? And is there anything to be made from the fact ‘The Death Module’ was renamed ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ based on a suggestion by Ms Churchill?

ABOVE: ‘The Angle Between two Walls’ (1967): JGB’s second ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

As Ballard explains: ”The Angle Between Two Walls’ is a still from Alone, the American filmmaker Steve Dwoskin’s movie about a masturbating woman.’ [8] First published in Ambit, September 1967, ‘Angle’ is a link to another Atrocity Exhibition story, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, first published in New Worlds in June, 1966. This ad is another visual-dominant piece, featuring the header, in full reverse, right above a transported female face. Reproduced in high contrast black and white, the woman’s abstracted hand reveals the source of her pleasure, but her thrown-back head reveals the conceptual basis of onanismic sex. Question headlines are usually avoided in real ads (nobody bothers to consider an answer), but in this example Ballard uses the rhetorical question to control our eye and has us read in a backward Z from the headline to the head to hand to text. This announcement is skillfully designed, and actually appears to be an ‘ad’, although one doubts very much that Vogue would consent to run it. The most explicitly ‘sexy’ of the series, Angle introduces the ‘little death’ of a ‘happy ending’, emphasizing in geometric terms the relationship between the two walls of reality and fiction and how they can be conceptualized by the imagination into memory and desire.

And, as we shall see, it also forms part of a larger concept.

ABOVE: ‘A Neural Interval’ (1968): JGB’s third ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

Ballard again: ‘Neural Interval was a picture from a bondage magazine.’ [9]

‘A Neural Interval’ is much the same in design and conception to ‘Angle’, and again the theme is associated with a story from The Atrocity Exhibition — in this case, ‘The Great American Nude’, first published in Ambit in July, 1968 — the same issue as this announcement. ‘A Neural Interval’ is also picture-dominant, showing a bound and gagged woman, dressed in sadomasochistic gear, who appears to be in a boat or beside the ocean. Her picture dominates the ad, and the text is reversed, with the copy left and the headline to the right, probably representing the reversal of affection in a sadistic relationship.

The header, ‘A Neural Interval’, suggests a stoppage in time, or at least a stoppage of stimuli to the senses. The text refers to a chapter in ‘The Great American Nude’ entitled A Diagram of Bones in which women have been reduced to pieces of ‘coloured plastic tubing, the geometry of a Disney.’ In his later annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard explains: ‘The past… is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future.’ That is a very good definition of how most advertising works on the conceptual level. Ballard continues: ‘The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.’

This concept of ‘packaging’ is one of the main themes of ‘The Great American Nude’, which features a huge, plastic amorphous Elizabeth Taylor and a Karen Novotny ‘sex kit’, which ‘may be more stimulating than the real thing.’ Or, as Dr Nathan explains: ‘Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.’

Such a perversion, in this case shown by the sadomasochistic illustration, reveals Ballard’s attempt at showing how the ‘outer world of reality’ — packaging — ‘must be quantified and eroticized’: in other words, accepted as a part of the aggressive aspect of the male sexual instinct, and not ‘reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form’, an invitation to the boredom and jaded excitements of socially-approved sexuality.

ABOVE: ‘A Placental Insufficiency’ (1970): JGB’s fourth ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

Ballard: ‘I’ve no idea of the source for the strange gun photo, though Les Krims was a very well known US photographer.’ [10]

‘Placental Insufficiency’ was published in Ambit in September, 1970, and uses as part of its text a snippet from ‘You and Me and The Continuum’, first published in the March 1966 issue of Impulse Magazine. This announcement is again almost entirely picture-dominated, showing a naked, middle-aged woman holding a rifle and looking away to the left as she stands in from of a car and trailer in a field. The text is small and difficult to read, as Ballard has chosen white type over a dark, mottled background, obscuring the text from a chapter of ‘You and Me and The Continuum’ entitled Placenta, which reads: ‘The X-ray plates of the growing foetus showed the absence of both placenta and umbilical cord. Was his then, Dr Nathan pondered, the true meaning of the immaculate conception — that not the mother but the child was virgin, innocent of any Jocasta’s clutching blood…’ To this Ballard adds some new copy: ‘Each afternoon she would take me into the garden of the trailer park. Undressing herself, she made me memorize the trajectories of her body.’

The meanings here are dense. In his first ad, ‘Homage’, Ballard identifies this ad as ‘the left axillary fossa of Princess Margaret’ — which actually means her royal armpit. Certainly an insufficient placenta, but in this case, given the ‘insufficiency’ of the headline, one assume this announcement deals with the unconceptualized or real woman, the woman who is not virginal, who does not escape the fate of Oedipus’ mother — and who is not embarrassed or concerned about the ‘packaging’ of her body, given it’s obvious distance from any cultural ideal of a sexual icon. The juxtaposition of the woman and her phallic, but non-aggressive gun adds meaning to the line, ‘the trajectories of her body’, but Ballard reduces her sexuality to the point of the ‘outer world of reality’ and appears to challenge us to ‘quantify and eroticize’ her. The irony, of course, is that the bound and gagged woman of ‘A Neural Interval’ and the naked trailer trash of ‘Placental Insufficiency’ both represent mythologized sexuality, albeit in an extreme form.

ABOVE: ‘Venus Smiles’ (1970): JGB’s fifth ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

As Ballard explains: ‘Claire Churchill… is also the subject of the fifth ad, which shows her, after swimming in the sea off Brighton, sitting naked in the front seat of my car covered with thousands of specks of seaweed — so outraged was she by my sneak photography that she stole my only copy of the ad, but she has agreed in the interests of Art and Literature to have it published.’ [11]

Suffice to say ‘Venus Smiles’ is an ad about voyeurism, about obsession, about the conceptualization of the elements of the body. Suppressed by Claire Churchill for years after Ballard made the photo, she finally relented and allowed her seaweed-strewn naked torso to be published in this ad in the winter, 1971 edition of Ambit. The copy is from two chapters in the short story, ‘Tolerance of the Human Face’, first published in Encounter in 1969. The first sentence is from Marriage of Freud and Euclid, and the second from Fake Newsreels. This ad is also dominated by a photo of a naked female body, and his decision to snap it unawares suggests an obsession with form studied at leisure. Given the ambivalence between title and subject — there is no head to supply a facial smile, although we are shown two sets of ‘lips’ — one is initially tempted to interpret this as a kind of thank-you to the goddess of femininity that the ad’s creator is in such close proximity to a loved one who loves back.

Again, Ballard’s design is asymmetrical in this ad, with the head, art and text forming a forward slash across the page, which is further accentuated by the dominant white legs. The normal manner of reading is once again reversed with the headline on the right and copy to the left. It is also a bookend to the first ad in the series — revealing Ballard’s progression through the psychopathologies of sexuality, from the conceptual to the physical. It is also worth noting that the first ad only shows Ms Churchill’s head, and the last just her body. Full circle, and now complete. But what does the text tell us? The first sentence is more revealing in what it leaves out — the idea in Marriage of Freud and Euclid of ‘turning everything into its inherent pornographic possibilities’ and how this marriage can become deformed through ‘displaced affections’ and an obsession with ‘targeting areas’ of sex and violence. The second sentence, from Fake Newsreels, is preceded by a scene in which Travers searches through ‘montage photographs’ of ‘pain and mutilation’ and Catherine Austin wonders why he is so obsessed with these nightmare images when their actual relationship is the opposite — associated with light, ardor and purity. Perhaps a clue can be found in the preceding chapter, called Hidden Faces, in which Ballard links colliding cars, the ‘geometry of aggression and desire’, with ‘celebrations of his wife’s death, the slow-motion newsreels recapitulating all his memories of childhood…’

When all five ads are considered together a pattern does seem to want to emerge. Mike Holliday, in his article on the three levels of reality in ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’, notes that: ‘Something else that was evidently important for Ballard at that time is the notion that we live on three different levels simultaneously, and that meaning is created where those different levels intersect.’ Ballard has discussed these three levels at length in various interviews, but perhaps one of the best explanations is given by Dr Nathan in the ‘Planes Intersect’ chapter of ‘Notes Toward A Mental Breakdown’:

‘Planes intersect: on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards, random deaths mimetized in the experimental auto-disasters of Nader and his co-workers. Their precise role in the unconscious merits closer scrutiny, by the way; they may in fact play very different parts from the one we assign them. On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by your opposed hands, the geometry of your postures, the time-values contained in this office, the angles between these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.’

Can this have any meaning or correlate to these Advertiser’s Announcements? In Part 2, we shall find out.

REFERENCES

[1] Pringle, David. (1984) ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’. RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 122.
[2] V. Vale. (1984) RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 147.
[3] Bax, Martin. (1984) ‘An Interview with Martin Bax’. RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 39.
[4] McGrath, R. (2008)
[5] V. Vale. (1984) RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 38.
[6] Pringle, David. (1984) ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’. RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 124.
[7] Storm, Jannick. (1968) ‘Interview with Jannick Storm’. Speculation #21, 1969.
[8] V. Vale. (1984) RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 147.
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid.

by Mike Holliday

Ballard’s oeuvre has many highlights: the 1960s ‘disaster trilogy’ of novels, Crash, Empire of the Sun, and short stories such as ‘The Voices of Time’ and ‘The Terminal Beach’. Not surprisingly, much of the secondary literature tends to concentrate on these key works. But even the most unremarkable of Ballard’s writings can repay close attention. One of the best examples is his ‘Court Circular’, which appeared in 1968 in Ambit magazine.

The first I heard of this curio was whilst idly perusing the ‘Bibliographies’ section of RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard. There I saw an advertisement for back-issues of Ambit, including the following:
No. 37 (1968) — ‘Court Circular’; and ‘Love — A Print-out for Clair Churchill’ (Rare: $25).
Not just one, but two items by Ballard that I’d never heard of! I traced the second piece, ‘Love – A Print-out’, to David Pringle’s 1984 bibliography, where it is described as ‘concrete poetry’ … but I was left wondering what on Earth the ‘Court Circular’ might be.

Eventually I got hold of a copy of Ambit #37, and found both items on the same page:

At first the ‘Court Circular’ appears to be a straightforward, rather ordinary, concrete poem, with a bit of artwork added to fill up the space. But one thing that bothered me was the apparently minor matter of the titles: the heading for the concrete poem — ‘Love: a Print-out for Claire Churchill’ — is in a much smaller typeface than ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’, almost as if the latter were the title for the entire page.

That this might actually be the case was suggested in the previous issue of Ambit where there is an announcement of a forthcoming newspaper-styled issue:

Do not miss number 37 a big blown-up Ambit (to newspaper size). All usual newspaper features but no journalists. J. G. Ballard reserved whole court page for an advertisement. Edwin Brock appointed Sports Editor. Henry Graham education correspondent. Lots and lots of pictures by all your favourite Ambit artists. Plenty of real news of the Going World.

(Ambit #36, 1968)

But if the ‘Court Circular’ was some form of advertisement, what might it be saying?

In order to understand that, we have to go back to the sorts of things that Ballard was working on during the period 1967 to 1968. In a cultural milieu where experimentation was almost mandatory, Ballard now counted among his friends and companions in experimentation: Eduardo Paolozzi — the Scottish sculptor and artist, Dr. Christopher Evans — the ‘maverick scientist’ who would partly inspire the character of Vaughan in Crash, and Martin Bax — a London paediatrician whose main off-curricular interest was editing Ambit, a magazine which he had started in 1959 to provide a mixture of poetry, fiction and art.

Inspired in part by these new friendships, Ballard’s work had gone well beyond prose fiction. A prime example — and particularly significant if the ‘Court Circular’ is some form of advertisement — is the series of what Ballard described as ‘advertiser’s announcements’, the first of which had appeared in the summer of 1967. Eventually a total of five such announcements would be published during the period 1967 to 1970.

The fourth of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements: from Ambit #45, 1970.

The concept behind these announcements was to advertise ideas, as Ballard explained in a 1968 interview:

It occurred to me about a year ago that advertising was an unknown continent as far as the writer was concerned [and that] I had a number of ideas which I could fit into my short stories, my fiction in general, but they would be better presented directly. Instead of advertising a product I would advertise an idea. … I’m advertising extremely abstract ideas in these advertisements, and this is a very effective way of putting them over. If these ideas were in the middle of a short story people could ignore them. … But if they’re presented in the form of an advertisement, like one in ‘Vogue’ magazine, or ‘Life’ magazine, people have to look at them, they have to think about them.

Interview with Jannick Storm, Speculation #21, recorded July 1968.

Another of Ballard’s interests in this period was textual and visual collage. Martin Bax has related how both he and Ballard were fascinated by the archive of their friend Paolozzi:

Eduardo has a huge image archive of material – which I think fascinated Jim very much. I suppose what Jim was interested in was Eduardo’s style of collecting images of the 20th century … I’ve been in his studio when we were doing some images, and he said, ‘What about a playing card, Martin?’ I said, ‘A playing card?’ And he opened a drawer which was totally full of packs of playing cards which he’d bought all over the world – some extremely sexy ones of ladies with nothing on … Eduardo’s used that type of material in his silkscreen work, and Ballard saw this as a way in which you could use this material in texts. There was a piece by Eduardo called ‘Moonstrips’ and ‘General Dynamic Fun’ that was published in Ambit. He had collected 300 or 400 pages of texts, and Ballard and I went through this huge pile of texts together and we cut and arranged it so it has some sort of curious logic. It starts off with a piece about internists locking up wealthy women in Long Island mental hospitals, and goes through a curious range of material.

Interview in ‘Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard’, recorded in 1983.

Advertisement for Volume 1 of Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips’: from Ambit #33, 1967.

The photograph of the models that formed part of the ‘Court Circular’ had originally been included in the Paolozzi/Ballard/Bax piece ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’, where it had been accompanied by a babble of ad-copy:

ALSO AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME, A ROMANTIC BIT OF MAQUILLAGE, VIENNA ROSE LIPSTICK-IN-THE-ROUND WITH A SABLE CONTOUR BRUSH TO DIP IN THE LITTLE ROUGE POT AND STROKE COLOR ON YOUR LIPS. THEN, READY TO LET GO FROM A WELL-PACKED QUIVER, THE INFINITE POWERS OF ATTRACTION THAT ARE UNIQUELY YOURS. THE WALTZING DRESS IN PURPLE SATIN (BELOW)-A LUXURIOUS CONCOCTION–SKIRT, BILLOWING FROM A TINY STRAPLESS BODICE, COVERED WITH A JACKET OF LIGHTS-CATERPILLARS OF CHENILLE, TWINKLING WITH FIREFLIES OF CRYSTALS, SILVER AND BLUE SEQUINS. BY SARMI, AT BERGDORF GOODMAN; NAN DUSKIN, PHILADELPHIA; NEIMAN-MARCUS BOTH PAGES; JEWELRY BY KENNETH LANE. KISLAV GLOVES. THESE PAGES: ALL COIFFURES BY THE ANTOINE SALON OF NEIMAN-MARCUS

Photo of models plus ad-copy, from Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips – General Dynamic F.U.N.’; Ambit #33, 1967.

When we turn to Ballard’s prose fiction output in 1968, the year the ‘Court Circular’ was published, we find that he was in the middle of writing the short stories that were to form The Atrocity Exhibition. The previous issue of Ambit had contained one such story, ‘The Great American Nude’, from which many of the usual ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ themes are missing: there’s no car crashes, no JFK assassination or Jackie Kennedy, no atrocity films, no gigantic billboards, and Kline, Coma and Xero — the ‘couriers of the unconscious’ — are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, ‘Great American Nude’ concentrates on the theme of the erotic. Central to the story is a gigantic abstract sculpture of the actress Elizabeth Taylor, and there are some humorous asides on the male’s perception of the female; for example, one of the characters, Captain Webster, is afraid to ‘climb up on her’ in case he falls into ‘some unpleasant orifice’.

Cover of Ambit #36, 1968, which included Ballard’s ‘The Great American Nude’.

Ballard’s emphasis on the erotic during this period may be in part due to Paolozzi. Michael Moorcock has recollected that in 1967/8, ‘Jimmy fell in with Paolozzi [and] shifted in that direction. Techno stuff. Women with big tits and guns’ (quoted in Iain Sinclair, Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J G Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, 1999).

Something else that was evidently important for Ballard at that time is the notion that we live on three different levels simultaneously, and that meaning is created where those different levels intersect. This idea is put into the mouth of Dr. Nathan in ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, which was published in mid-1967 under its original title ‘The Death Module’. It had first appeared, using many of the same phrases, in comments that Ballard made in a BBC radio interview with George MacBeth:

… one has many layers, many levels of experience going on at the same time. On one level one might have the world of public events, Cape Kennedy, Vietnam, political life, on another level the immediate personal environment, the rooms we occupy, the postures we assume. On a third level, the inner world of the mind. All these levels are, as far as I can see them, equally fictional, and it is where these levels interact that one gets the only kind of valid reality that in fact exists nowadays. The characters in these stories occupy positions on these various levels. On the one hand, a character is displayed on an enormous billboard as a figment in a CinemaScope epic; on another level he’s an ordinary human being moving through the ordinary to-and-fro of everyday life; on a third level he’s a figment in his own fantasies. These various aspects of the character interact and produce the main reality of the fiction.

‘The New Science Fiction: A Conversation between J. G. Ballard and George MacBeth’, broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 29th March 1967.

Pulling all this together, we can see that in 1967/8 Ballard was particularly interested in the advertisement of ideas, in textual and visual collage, in eroticism and the male’s perception of the female, and in the idea of three levels of experience. And all of this is present in the ‘Court Circular’ in Ambit #37. Here’s what we see …

Firstly there is the concrete poem ‘Love: A Print-out…’. This is explicitly personalised — it’s ‘for Claire Churchill’. It deals with the everyday facets of sex and love — ‘hair’, ‘fuck’, ‘girl’, ‘suck’. And it presents itself as having a structure: firstly because it is laid out in the form of a regular grid, and secondly because it can be read in the form of a ‘boy meets girl’ story, ending with ‘wife’ and ‘baby’. (Of course, we have to impose that linearity on the poem ourselves by reading it from the top left and then consecutively down each column — it’s actually just a series of separate words spaced out in a regular display.) So this is sexuality, or the perception of the female by a male, on the level of everyday life.

Next, there is the photograph of the models. The girls all look much the same, and have a ‘classic female figure’ of the time; they all wear underwear that is designed to say ‘sexy’ but without actually being especially erotic; they all wear a broad and meaningless smile. And the photo is an ‘image’ — it’s presumably from Paolozzi’s archive, and it has even appeared in Ambit the previous year, as part of ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’ This is sexuality at the level of mediatised reality, ‘a figment in CinemaScope’ as Ballard puts it.

Finally, there are the drawings by Bruce Mclean. Here the individual features of the woman cannot be seen … what we have instead are the elements of erotic fantasy: the long hair, the arched back, an open mouth, the over-emphasised thighs in various positions, the arm hanging languidly down from the body, a glimpse of the pudenda (it seems to be a black blob, perhaps the ‘orifice’ that worries Captain Webster in ‘The Great American Nude’). This is sexuality as perceived by a man on the level of the imagination.

Two of Bruce Mclean’s drawings from the ‘Court Circular’.

So the ‘Court Circular’ displays sexuality — or, more specifically, the perception of the female by the male — in terms of all three of Ballard’s levels of reality. And perhaps Bruce Mclean’s drawings symbolise the power that the imagination has to flow into the interstices and create a meaningful reality in the gaps and angles between the different levels of our existence.

This, then, is the advertisement within ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’. Perhaps it is a touch didactic … but Ambit #37 is, after all, a newspaper.

Front page of the newspaper issue; Ambit #37, 1968.

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

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

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

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

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

ABOVE: Photo by Steven Meisel.

ABOVE: Photo by Kohei Yoshiyuki.

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

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

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

..:: Previously on Ballardian

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

Hans Ulrich Obrist. Formulas for Now.

What do you get if you multiply sex by technology? The future (according to JG Ballard, in this book). Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, asked creatives and academics to invent a formula that summed up modern life: Jeff Koons, Richard Dawkins and Damien Hirst were among those to oblige. Out now. (Thames & Hudson).

ABOVE: Image via Hard Mag.

The following written interview with J.G. Ballard was first published in issue 1 of Hard Mag in 2005. It was conducted by Dan Mitchell and Simon Ford, the publisher and editor respectively of the magazine, and was intended to follow up some of the questions raised in Ford’s article about Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition of 1970, published in the same edition. The article has since been revised and republished over at /seconds and if you’re unfamiliar with the exhibition, it makes for a great introduction. Meanwhile, the interview makes its first reappearance beyond the confines of Hard Mag here at ballardian.com.

Many thanks to Dan, Simon and Hard Mag for sanctioning this second wind.

Interview Date: March 2004 (1756 words)
Original font: Lucida Sans Typewriter Oblique (9-point)

Copyright Hard Mag 2005.

QUESTION 1
We’re interested in the reaction of the visitors to ‘Crashed Cars’. Do you think the work and a similar presentation today would elicit a similar response? Would an audience today be more detached and more self-conscious about their reactions? Are the reasons for going to such events different today from then? Was the audience likely to be more critical then? How did the audience see themselves then (today’s art world audience can be accused of looking to be seen looking good), were the visitors part of an elite, did you see them as sophisticated? Or perhaps as mere extras in a visual field dominated by your work (the grass to the cows)?

ANSWER 1
At the opening party there was wildly drunken reaction, and what seemed to be barely repressed hostility came bursting out. During the month on show the cars were attacked, daubed with paint and so on. Many visitors stared at them numbly. I don’t think there would be the same reaction today, 35 years later. Since then there have been so many provocations that the audience response to three crashed cars would be much more calm. People are still shockable today — as with the Myra Hindley handprints portrait — but nothing defuses a sense of shock more than the sense that it’s all been done before. Duchamp’s urinal would produce no gasps, in fact I think a [sic] saw it, or a replica, at the Hayward gallery some ago. No-one was looking at it. I said to my girl-friend that the only way to startle the audience would have been to urinate into the thing, which I think someone has now done. I don’t think today’s audiences are all that different. Apart from the Arts Lab regulars, the audience in 1969 were readers of International Times, rather than today’s Time Out, and people interested in any new ideas that might be floating about. They certainly weren’t extras — I was very keen to see their reactions to the cars. The whole thing was a psychological test, to see whether my hunches were sufficiently confirmed for me to go on and write Crash. They were. The show’s object was not to shock, but to prompt a response.

QUESTION 2
What would have to be done to create a similar response today, given the increased number of international artists, the larger scale of the art world, the many crossovers with global finance through sponsorship deals and the post-young British artist Tate Modern era/culture?

ANSWER 2
To shock people today is as easy as it ever was. Set up a situation that elicits pity sympathy and concern and then deride the sentiments — the Hindley portrait did that. But that kind of outrage has been devalued, and the artists with it. Besides, there are far more subtle ways of unsettling people. Think of the outrage that greeted the impressionists. Dali’s melting watches, Ernst’s eroded rocks are far more disturbing than anything dreamed up by the Turner Prize.

ABOVE: Ballard’s crashed Pontiac. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

QUESTION 3
Were the cars for sale as artworks? Did you see them as artworks, then and now? Were you asked or did you ever plan to do any more shows? What is your general attitude to the art world, did you ever want to be an artist?

ANSWER 3
They weren’t for sale, though there is a photograph of the Pontiac with a ‘£3500′ [sic] price tag in the windscreen, which I think was published in the Daily Mirror and was probably put there by the cameraman. The cars were certainly sculptures of a kind. I wasn’t asked to do any more shows. The Arts Lab closed for good soon after, and the 1970s began, a dreary decade. I saw the cars as a one off. I’ve always been very interested in painting and sculpture, which are a better key to the public’s imagination than the novel, a form that tends to resist innovation. In many ways the art world is ferociously competitive, far more than the literary world, whre [sic] writers are protected by their agents and can work in total isolation if they want to (like myself).

QUESTION 4
Was Euphoria Bliss the stripper/interviewer at the opening party? Do you have a copy or can you summarize what you described as the stripper’s ‘damning review’ she wrote for the underground paper Friendz?

ANSWER 4
No, the interviewer was not Euphoria Bliss, who was highly intelligent (and I hope still is) and completely tuned into the various projects I experimented with — stripping to a recital of a scientific paper at the ICA and so on. These were part of my then association with the magazine Ambit, for which I was trying to drum up publicity. Euphoria, who worked as a professional stripper, was extremely beautiful, and easy-going. The interviewer/stripper at the Arts Lab was recruited by someone at the gallery. She disapproved strongly of the cars, deciding that she would only appear topless (a fascinating response, it seemed to me at the time). A couple of drunken guests manhandled her in the back seat of the crashed Pontiac, and she claimed that they had tried to rape her. I can’t remember the review in detail or her name, but she was damning.

ABOVE: Euphoria Bliss holds court. Front row left to right: Euphoria, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ballard, Michael Foreman (art editor of Ambit) and Dr Martin Bax, editor of Ambit. We don’t know who the chaps at the back are. This photo was taken in 1972, at the Royal Academy of Art in front of a Paolozzi sculpture that was being exhibited.

QUESTION 5
Would you produce something similar to ‘Crashed Cars’ today? Has the car, at the same time as maintaining its position as the engine of capitalism, lost something of it’s power to signify by its very dominance and accessibility (for example, cars are smashed up for fun on quiz shows to aid the spectacle). Has the ‘crashed car’ taboo shifted, and if so to where?

ANSWER 5
I would if I wanted to test some idea, though I think those days are past for me. I think the car has retained its hold on us, partly by the way in which it elicits aggression and an illusion of freedom and partly because while driving we control the possibility of our own deaths. The Princess Di death took on extra resonance that would have been absent if she had died in a hotel fire.

QUESTION 6
Are you still interested in creating ‘posters’ that can be read as novels, or has the poster lost some of its power? If so what has it been replaced by?

ANSWER 6
Sadly, the economies of publishing are against the idea.

QUESTION 7
Was Millennium People intended as an attack on the middle classes? Compare to the 1959 short story ‘Now: Zero’, a text that kills its reader.

ANSWER 7
Not an attack, no. As one of the middle classes. I feel for their plight. Their rebellion in MP turns out to be pointless, since they are the last group who could hope to rebel — docility is in their bones. The book is about pointless violence, and pointless protest, which are increasingly around us today. It’s a waste of time looking for a motive, when the absence of a motive is the only point. This makes Hungerford, Columbine and so on impossible to predict. The Islamist attacks on New York and Madrid are another matter entirely.

ABOVE: JGB photo via Hard Mag.

QUESTION 8
Why blow up Tate Modern? Is it because it is now the representative site of contemporary high culture, an instrument of the massification of that high culture, and the ‘spiritual’ heart of new religion, a cathedral to the art of spectacle? Or is it a cultural Auschwitz? Would it be better to disseminate this culture far and wide, so there was a mini Tate in every shopping centre, or really dissolve the barrier between culture and life Helmut Newton photos used to sell Sainsbury’s economy baked beans?

ANSWER 8
My revolutionaries see Tate Modern as one of the ways in which the middle classes are brain-washed, along with education generally. (Not a view I share). The process of popularising doesn’t necessarily entail dilution or dumbing down — the Hollywood film was popular but highly original in its heyday. But the modern movement set out to be provocative and revolutionary from the start (Manet?), and popularising the avant-garde is bound to blunt the blade. The entertainment conglomerates that now rule our world can neutralise and absorb almost anything, and one needs educated feet to dance just out of reach of their embrace. People have done it — Dalí, Helmut Newton, Francis Bacon and others.

QUESTION 9
Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?

ANSWER 9
The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.

QUESTION 10
Is there a role today for an avant-garde? And if so what fields of operation are open to such an avant-garde? Is there the possibility for such an avant-garde within the art world and the world of publishing today?

ANSWER 10
Yes, though it won’t necessarily appear in the places we expect. Follow your own obsessions, use them like stepping stones. and with luck you’ll find your way into your mysterious inner self.

All the best,
J.G. Ballard

..:: MORE INFO:
+ Hard Mag

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

Here is the press release with fuller information on JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, opening today at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

EXHIBITION AT THE CCCB: J.G. Ballard: An Autopsy of the New Millennium

CURATOR: Jordi Costa
DATES: 22 July–2 November 2008
ADVISOR: Marcial Souto
SPACE: Gallery 2
PRODUCTION: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)
DESIGN: Dani Freixas – Varis Arquitectes, with the collaboration of Pep Anglí
COORDINATION: Miquel Nogués

The CCCB presents the exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium”, from 22 July to 2 November 2008. The exhibition features the English writer of novels and short stories, considered one of the most intelligent, seminal voices of contemporary fiction.

The literary work of James Graham Ballard (Shanghai, 1930), the paradigm cult writer, has for some time now been looking ahead to dissect the world in which we are now living. His visionary imagination grew in the realms of dreamlike, subjective science fiction and gradually came to embrace an aseptic hyperrealism. Deep down, the themes are always the same: the keys of contemporaneity and the pathologies of our immediate future, as though he were carrying out the autopsy of a stillborn future.

J. G. Ballard has constructed a body of work marked by recurrent themes and obsessive symbols that is capable of transcending generic codes to decipher the present and propose plausible views of the future. This exhibition sets out to offer an itinerary through Ballard’s creative universe: his themes and obsessions, his dissection of the secret keys of the contemporary, the traces of his own life in his fictional body of work, his artistic and literary referents, and his precise, disenchanted intuitions of a future life governed by the concepts of aseptic anti-utopia and disaster.

The exhibition uses a whole range of supports to introduce visitors into the Ballardian world: stage sets, audiovisual installations, the complete library of Ballard’s writings, works by Ballardian artists and miscellaneous documentation.

The exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium” coincides with this year’s International Literature Festival, Kosmopolis 08. It is therefore included in the festival programme, which devotes a special section to Ballard.

K08 includes two sessions about the work of this English author and his influence on the contemporary cultural imaginary. The first looks at the influence of Ballard’s body of work on Hispanic writers, and the second centres on the English-speaking world, in the form of a dialogue about the various ways in which Ballard’s literature has struck a chord with new generations of writers who identify with the visionary aspect of his work. Participants: Paco Porrúa, Marcial Souto, Marta Peirano, Toby Litt, Bruce Sterling, Agustín Fernández Mallo and V. Vale.

Alpha Channel devotes a further section to Ballard, exploring the audiovisual production inspired by his literature.

Layout of the exhibition

WHAT I BELIEVE

Photo via RE/Search Publications.

The French magazine Science Fiction, edited by Daniel Riche, commissioned a text from J. G. Ballard in which he summed up his personal and artistic credo. The result, published in the January 1984 issue of the publication, was “What I Believe”, a summary of Ballardian poetics which synthesises the obsessions of the author and the ability of his writing to decipher the secret keys of the contemporary world, as well as its disturbing evolutive logic. The canonic version of the text in English appeared in the summer 1984 issue (number eight) of the British magazine Interzone. Below are some excerpts:

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

J.G. Ballard

FROM SHANGHAI TO SHEPPERTON

Photo via CCCB.

Despite being fantasy fiction, the literary work of J. G. Ballard handles a repertory of images and obsessions that are closely linked to his own life. These early experiences were to mark his worldview and find a particular form of sublimation in his later literary output.

Son of chemist and textile entrepreneur James Ballard (1902-1967) and of Edna Ballard (1905-1999), J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November 1930 and spent his early years in the comfortable surroundings of the international colony in the west of the city. The Japanese invasion of 1937 and the outbreak of World War II brought to an end the hitherto peaceable existence of a British community that ran its everyday life under the aegis of a nostalgia for Victorian society. Between March 1943 and August 1945 the Ballard family was held captive in the Lunghua internment camp.

In semi-autobiographical works such as Empire of the Sun (adapted for the cinema by Steven Spielberg) and The Kindness of Women, the writer revealed the origin of many of the obsessions running through his work. The atomic bomb on Nagasaki, how he adapted to life in a concentration camp and the series of deaths that marked his life (victims of bombings in the streets of Shanghai, the Chinese soldier killed by the Japanese at a train station, the first corpse he dissected in his years as a medical student, the Turkish pilot presumed dead during his years as a pilot at a Canadian base, the premature death of his wife and the death of a close friend) have a correlate in some of the most shocking scenes of his literary work.

The creation of his imaginary world has its epicentre away from the literary circles and bustling cultural life of London, in his home in Shepperton: a territory that the writer considers not as a soulless suburb but as a magical space whose inner light can be freed by imagination, as he illustrates in his novel The Unlimited Dream Company.

LANDSCAPES OF DREAM

Dali meets Ballard. Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s formative years were marked by the attempt to reconcile his incipient literary vocation with the articulation of a voice of his own. His initial contact with psychoanalysis and Surrealist painting opened the door to the construction of a unique and totally distinctive artistic identity. As he saw it, explorations of the unconscious in the fields of science and art offered the most precise reading of the spirit of the time and had predicted some of the more obscure pathways of the 20th century. In the dreamlike, desolate landscapes of Surrealism Ballard recognised the images of his own inner world. His writing not only recreates many of the visions of Surrealism, it also reproduces some of its aesthetic strategies⎯superimpositions, mirroring, false perspectives, mutations⎯in order to explain the deep structure of the real.

INNER SPACE

JGB’s second ‘advertiser’s announcement’ for Ambit magazine. Scan via Mike Holliday.

After discovering science fiction as a reader during his years in Canada as an RAF pilot (1953-54), J. G. Ballard encountered in the genre the ideal framework for his literary creation. From the very first, his sudden emergence in the medium entailed a break with tradition and the dominant currents of the time. To his contemporaries’ technological optimism and fascination for the exploration of outer space, Ballard counterposed an immersion in inner space.

Ballard theorized his singular contribution to the science-fiction genre in an article published in 1962 in New Worlds magazine. “Which way to inner space?” represented a turning point in the evolution of the genre with consequences that only much later became evident. With his theory of inner space, Ballard established a distance between himself and science-fiction forerunners and many of his peers as he sketched out the future direction of the genre. Ballard conquered a new territory for the genre, highlighting the role of science fiction as a mirror of the present and a means to self-exploration.

DISASTER AREA

Photo by Ana Barrado.

The idea of disaster underlies Ballard’s entire body of work though it finds its maximum expression in works such as The Drowned World and The Drought. In the face of disaster, typical Ballard characters do not act like characters in a 1970s’ disaster film. Far from trying to re-establish order, Ballardian characters see cataclysm as a focus of attraction and seem ready to accept the rules that this new reality imposes, though this may mean renouncing their own identity, wisdom and, inevitably, survival. In this process, the characters will discover a number of hidden truths about themselves. What is happening is not so much self-destruction as the seduction of change and the tortuous path towards psychological plenitude.

The idea comes from Joseph Conrad, and in Ballard’s hands it becomes the basis for his particular conception of science fiction: a literature that speaks to us of radical changes in mindset, fundamental transformations in perception—in short, of the constant evolution of inner space.

TECHNOLOGY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s career entered a feverish state of change in the mid-1960s, following the premature death of his wife Mary Ballard from pneumonia in San Juan (Alicante). His traditional interest in the avant-garde and in experimental literature completely intoxicated his writing, which exploded in a radical switch to fragmentation, technical language and a taste for the abstract. The Terminal Beach (1964) blazed a trail that the later books The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) and Crash (1973) were to take to the limit. The author focussed on a form of contemporaneity marked by the death of feeling and a shift from a physical to a mediatic landscape in which reality and fiction are blurred. The more classical High Rise (1974), Concrete Island (1975), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) and Hello America (1981) continued to develop this vision of an essentially psychopathological 20th century in which pornographic imagery, technological fetishism and dehumanised architecture converge in a traumatic cosmology.

ASEPSIS AND NEOBARBARISM

Photo by Ana Barrado.

It is significant, and deeply disturbing, that J. G. Ballard’s literature has moved from science fiction to the realist register without abandoning its main themes. The most recent passage in Ballard’s narrative work⎯opening with the novella Running Wild (1988) and for the moment closing with Kingdom Come (2006)⎯tours the aseptic architecture of gated communities, residential areas, technoparks, holiday villages and shopping malls in order to extend the terminal diagnosis of a humanity disconnected from its primary instincts. According to the writer, only injections of violence can disrupt the lethargy and make a new utopia possible.

THE BALLARD LIBRARY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

Here, the exhibition presents the first editions (in English) of the 42 books written by Ballard and offers visitors the chance to consult modern editions published in Spanish.

The Wind from Nowhere. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1962
Billenium. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Drowned World. Gollancz, London, 1963
Passport to Eternity. Berkeley, New York, 1963
The Terminal Beach. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1964
The Burning World. Berkeley, New York, 1964
The Drought. Jonathan Cape, London, 1965
The Four-Dimensional Nightmare. Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1963
The Crystal World. Jonathan Cape, London, 1966
The Impossible Man. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Terminal Beach. Penguin, London, 1966
The Disaster Area. Jonathan Cape, London, 1967
The Overloaded Man. Panther, London, 1967
The Atrocity Exhibition. Jonathan Cape, London, 1970
The Inner Landscape. Paperback Library, New York, 1971
Chronopolis and other stories. Putnam, New York, 1972
Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A. Grove Press, New York, 1972
Vermilion Sands. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Crash. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Concrete Island. Farrar, Jonathan Cape, London, 1974
High-Rise. Jonathan Cape, London, 1975
Low-Flying Aircraft. Jonathan Cape, London, 1976
The Unlimited Dream Company. Jonathan Cape, London, 1979
Hello America. Jonathan Cape, London, 1981
News from the Sun. Interzone, London, 1982
Myths of the Near Future. Jonathan Cape, London, 1982
Empire of the Sun. Gollancz, London, 1984
The Day of Forever. Gollancz, London, 1986
The Day of Creation. Gollancz, London, 1987
Running Wild. Jonathan Cape, London, 1988
War Fever. Collins, London, 1990
The Kindness of Women. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1991
Rushing to Paradise. Flamingo, London, 1996
Cocaine Nights. Flamingo, London, 1996
A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Picador, New York, 1996
Super-Cannes. Flamingo, London, 2000
JG Ballard. The Complete Short Stories. Flamingo, London, 2001
Millennium People. Flamingo, London, 2003
Kingdom Come. Fourth Estate, London, 2006
Miracles of Life. Shanghai to Shepperton. An Autobiography. Fourth Estate, London, 2008

BALLARDIAN ART

Image by Michelle Lord.

Ballard’s work represents an open-ended body of work that still has revelations in store for his readers.

On the one hand, Ballard functions as an oracle who is proved right with every day that passes.

On the other, he exerts an enormous influence on creators in all disciplines, from fantasy cinema to industrial music.

J. G. Ballard forms part of the small group of creators capable of inspiring an adjective. Collins English Dictionary defines the adjective Ballardian as “1. of James Graham Ballard (J. G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”.

Proceeding from the most diverse realms of creation, artists who accept the adjective as a badge of honour are increasingly numerous. To identify oneself as Ballardian is to form part of a widening circle of initiates aware of the central role played by an author who is a stranger to labels and resists any attempt at classification.

At this point, the exhibition immerses us in the work of various authors to have been described as Ballardian: Ana Barrado, Ann Lislegaard, Michelle Lord and creators of home cinema using mobile phones.

GENERAL INFORMATION

DATES
22 July – 2 November 2008

TIMES
From Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays: from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thursdays: from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Closed on Mondays except public holidays

PRICES

Admission: €4.40
Wednesdays (except public holidays) and group visits: €3.30
Free admission: under-16s, the unemployed, Friends of the CCCB and every first Wednesday of the month.
Concessions on Wednesdays (except public holidays) for senior citizens and students: €3.30

FURTHER INFORMATION
CCCB – www.cccb.org

CCCB PRESS OFFICE
Mònica Muñoz – Irene Ruiz – Lucia Calvo
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona
93 306 41 23 / 93 306 41 00
premsa@cccb.org

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

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

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

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

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

Peter says:

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

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

Elsewhere, he elaborates, suggesting that we are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the info (via the JGB Yahoo list):

Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J.G. Ballard

Series Editors: Jeannette Baxter, Sebastian Groes, Sean Matthews

Editor: Jeannette Baxter

J.G. Ballard is one of the most significant British writers of the contemporary period. His award-winning novels are stock features of school and university reading lists, yet the appeal of Ballard’s idiosyncratic imagination is such that his work also enjoys something of a cult status with the reading public. The hugely successful cinematic adaptations of Empire of the Sun (Spielberg, 1987) and Crash (Cronenberg, 1996) further confirm Ballard’s unique place within the literary, cultural and popular imaginations.

Although J. G. Ballard is known primarily as a novelist, he is also the author of over one hundred short stories, a number of which have been adapted for television and theatre. For the first time, Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard places a discussion of Ballard’s short stories alongside readings of the major novels in order to explore issues of form, narrative and experimentation.

Another defining element of this volume is its coverage of Ballard’s extensive catalogue of cultural journalism. Over the course of five decades, Ballard has written for publications as various as The Daily Telegraph, Playboy, the Guardian, Time Out, New Worlds, The Times and Vogue. Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard is the first study of its kind to explore Ballard’s significance as a cultural commentator, and to investigate the relationship between his creative and critical writings.

Whilst offering fresh readings of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard’s writing, including history, sexuality, violence, consumer capitalism, and urban space, this edition of Contemporary Critical Perspectives engages with hitherto unexplored questions of post 9/11 politics, terrorism, neo-imperialism, science, morality and ethics.

Contents:

General Introduction: Jeannette Baxter (UEA)

Biography/Chronology: Jeannette Baxter

Chapter 1: Brian Baker(Lancaster) ‘The Geometry of the Space Age: J. G. Ballard’s short fiction and science fiction of the 1960s’: a reassessment of J. G. Ballard’s early work.’

Chapter 2: Jake Huntley (UEA) ‘Re-reading The Atrocity Exhibition.’

Chapter 3: Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope), ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: Place and Space in the Work of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 4: Corin Depper (Kingston), ‘Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 5: Umberto Rossi Mind is the Battlefield: Reading Ballard’s ‘Life Trilogy’ as War Literature

Chapter 6: David Pringle, ‘The genres of J. G. Ballard’s non-fiction.’

Chapter 7: Jeannette Baxter (UEA), ‘Visions of Europe in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes’

Chapter 8: Philip Tew (Brunel), ‘The possibilities of sacrifice, the certainties of trauma: J. G. Ballard’s Postmillennial Fiction.’

An interview with J.G. Ballard by Jeannette Baxter

All photography by Simon Sellars.

In May 2007 I found myself in England for the J.G. Ballard conference at the University of East Anglia. With that out of the way, I did what comes naturally. I took the train to Shepperton: Ballardian Ground Zero. I had intended to take photographs of the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing, but at the same time I had no intention of infringing on JGB’s privacy. So, no shots of his house and street here. What I was aiming for instead was the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain (while avoiding the dreaded “p*****geography” word), the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories.

In the end, despite Shepperton’s reoccurrence across Ballard’s ouevre, just one book coloured the day, so brilliant is its corona: The Unlimited Dream Company, that beautiful, mad, lush waking dream wrenched direct from Ballard’s cerebral cortex. In the book an airport worker, Blake, seeking to escape his mundane life in London, steals a Cessna and crashes it into the Thames River in Shepperton. He is rescued from drowning by a troupe of locals and discovers that he is unable to leave the town; there seems to be an invisible psychic barrier that denies him egress. Giving in to it, he learns that he now has strange powers. He can fly unaided (although still unable to leave the town boundaries) and he can shapeshift into different animals: birds, whales, deer. He can also conjure into being menageries of birds and packs of wild animals from thin air, or even from the orifices of his body. His sexual appetite grows polymorphously perverse and he attempts to mount anyone and anything. Galvanized by his raw libido, the townsfolk forget about their London office jobs and their safe suburban lives, and a cult soon forms around Blake as he teaches them to fly, to reject their hyperreal consumerist lifestyles in favour of a journey into the sun, an ultimate realm in which they would celebrate “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.

Throughout, Ballard allows Shepperton to glow lysergically before the mind’s eye, a flaring vision of the suburbs and post-industrial liminal zones that threatens to negate the entire world. It’s no wonder he’s such a powerful influence on artists and filmmakers: the writing has a pure visionary quality that, as I’ve always maintained, transcends literature, that bends time and space (but of course). Here, then, are my photos and commentary from my trip to Shepperton — my small tribute to this remarkable book and the marvellously vivid quality of Ballard’s work, my attempt to provide an on-location correlation for the film of The Unlimited Dream Company playing in the cinema of my mind.

I must thank Jo M. for her company throughout the day. Jo’s marvellous insights into the town and her knowledge of Ballard’s work enriched the experience, and her maps and keen navigational skills greatly surpassed my own wretched sense of direction.

This feature is presented in two parts. In Part 1 we set out from the train station, making a direct line for the fields and water meadows surrounding the motorway just past Ballard’s street. Crossing this metallized river by bridge, which Blake was unable to do, we make our way to the film studios, which feature prominently in the book (doubtless Blake made it by flying). In Part 2, due next week, we explore the reservoirs near the studios, also a prominent feature of the book, before crossing back over the motorway and into town, and then on into Old Shepperton where we attempt to locate the exact spot where Blake ditched his plane in the Thames.

Outside the railway station the last of the office-workers were once again making a half-hearted attempt to set off for London. But as I approached they gave up all thought of work. Ties loosened, jackets over their shoulders, they strolled through the holiday throng, their sales conferences and committee meetings forgotten.

J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

I live in Melbourne, where if you travel in certain directions 40 minutes out from the centre you find outlying suburbs and satellite towns that are basically parched-concrete aprons with brick-veneer boxes on them in which entire families somehow cohabitate. Parks are rare, greenery is sparse and everything is geometric and regimented, with great swathes of freeway cut through the middle. (Here is an example of the type of ennui this leached Australian suburbia can inspire; here is another.) Somehow from reading Ballard I expected similar of Shepperton, 40 minutes from the capital by train, especially given that most people who interview Ballard at his house remark on the dominance of the motorway and the terminal nature of the town.

Ballard himself has been known to play this up, as in his 1988 interview with Paul Rambali. “Post space race, when the moon was discovered to be merely dust,” Rambali writes, “his novels caught the imagination of a young generation that sensed an imminent everyday apocalypse, the future shock of the homogenous new suburbs”:

“I fear this is the future,” says Ballard… He is talking about Shepperton… “Driving through the suburbs of Germany in the Seventies I could see it. Everything is controlled. Even a drifting leaf looks out of place… Once you move to the suburbs, time stops. People measure their lives by consumer goods, the dreams that money can buy. I think that’s more dangerous. People have no loyalties anymore.”

But Ballard continues to live in this suburb where time has stopped, a sort of self-imposed alienation. In this, he is like a character from one of his novels, accepting the entropy that surrounds him.

Paul Rambali, “Visions Of Dystopia”, The Face (1988).

Thus I was a bit taken aback upon arriving at Shepperton station to be greeted by what looked like a picturesque town with a homely village atmosphere, winding streets with real-ale pubs smack in the middle of them, greenery galore and heritage-style red-brick housing. Sure, time has stopped but it’s hardly the dehumanised non-space of Ballardian lore. I’ve certainly seen far bleaker residential areas elsewhere in the British Isles. Still, it’s what’s under the surface that counts in Ballard…

Completing my transformation of this suburban town, I walked along the main roads leading to the perimeter of Shepperton. To the south I threw my semen at the foot of Walton Bridge. Standing in the centre of the main road to London, I ignored the hornblasts of the passing drivers. Once again I was sure that none of them realized I was naked, and thought they were looking at an eccentric villager trying to throw himself under their wheels.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In 2004, why did the stars align in such a cataclysmic way in Surrey, the county in which Shepperton nestles? As the Shepperton sign above indicates, it was a bumper year. But that’s not the whole story: in 2004 Surrey was in the top 10 for child road deaths in Britain. What would 2006′s final tally be? The sign’s single interrogation point for 2006 almost begs us to beat the 2004 record. Death Race 2006, perhaps?

Is Surrey, and Shepperton, somehow responsible? Is there any truth to the rumour, spread by Mikita Brottman in her introduction to the book Car Crash Culture, that Ballard in Crash “charts a parallel between road intersections and astrological signs”?

Perhaps the truth is rather more prosaic, yet far more disturbing:

Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality?

Ballard, Crash! (short film; 1971).

[The] demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures… our apparently limitless powers for conceptualisation — what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.

Ballard, “Introduction to the French edition of Crash” (1973).

For some reason known only to the interior of my head I was trapped in this riverside town, around which my mind had drawn a strict perimeter, bounded on the north by the motorway, on the west and south by the winding course of the Thames. I watched the traffic moving eastwards to London, certain now that if I tried to leave by this last door of the horizon the same queasy perspectives would unravel in front of me.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Ian Allan Ltd. is a travel agent based in Terminal House just near the station. “The Terminal Beach” (1964) is one of Ballard’s finest stories and the blueprint for The Atrocity Exhibition. Set on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, which has been blasted into an undifferentiated slag by American nuclear testing, the story follows a possibly irradiated ex-US airman who wanders around on the island attempting to find the beach that reminds him of where he was born. Detaching himself from reality, he communes with the dead and reinvents — and destroys — himself according to the “any space whatever” of postwar globalism, represented by the sad spectre of the nuclear-poisoned island.

Before we ventured further into the dark heart of Shepperton, I was tempted to ask Ian Allan himself if he would later sell me a ticket to “the white leviathan, zero”, as the spirit of a dead Japanese man describes the terminal beach. But inside I suspected that like the travel agent in The Truman Show, he would conspire to ensure I could never leave Shepperton, that the only journey I would be undertaking would be deeper and further into my skull.

“Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve,” said Ballard in 2000. “A place of refuge for the endangered mind.”

The helicopter had retreated to the water-meadow across the river. Swept along towards the church, I saw Miriam knocked from her feet by the running crowd. As she knelt on the grass she was seized by the young women, a group of secretaries who happily stripped the clothes from her shoulders and lifted her into a head-dress of feathers.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

At the end of Ballard’s street is a walking trail that passes through verdant parks and meadows. It’s completely unexpected as you follow the winding road and come out the other side. We pictured Ballard, on first arriving in Shepperton, exploring his environs, going for a walk to the end of his street and discovering this wonderland that is like a theme park torn from its context and thrust into the middle of suburbia, like the geodesically preserved forests in Silent Running. The effect is quite unreal, and gazing into these ponds I was summarily transported to that mystical long shot in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in which vegetation ripples and sways under flowing water, at once completely artificial in the intensity of the film’s colour and focus but at the same time so organic it transcends reason and logic.

Everywhere a macabre vegetation was emerging. Strange predators moved through the grass. Snakes climbed from the banks of the creek. A plague of spiders cast webs of pus across the trees, drawing silver shrouds over the dead flowers. Above the grave white flies festered in a halo. As a pale dawn filled the meadow I could see shrike attacking the last of the hummingbirds and impaling them on the thorn-bushes. The whole of Shepperton was sickening, poisoned by the despair flowing from me.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

It was then, fifty yards from the motorway, that I made an unsettling discovery. Although I was walking at a steady pace across the uneven soil, I was no longer drawing any closer to the pedestrian bridge… the motorway remained as far away as ever. If anything, this distance between us seemed to enlarge. At the same time, Shepperton receded behind me, and I found myself standing in an immense field filled with poppies and a few worn tyres.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Where we found ourselves, a tiny river cuts under concrete slabs and leafy vegetation snakes around motorway pedestrian bridges. The sound of trickling water blends with the Doppler effect of speeding vehicles. Here, where we found ourselves, “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate”, the absolute state to which Blake craves, would be fully apparent to a man of Ballard’s imaginative powers, in fact would appear fully formed. How many of his books were inspired by walks through this backstreet terrain? The Drowned World, with its vision of a lush, overgrown London? The Unlimited Dream Company itself? Even Concrete Island, despite the austerity of its title?

According to Peter Linnett:

The island isn’t concrete at all. It seems to live, organically. Admittedly it overlays the ruins of some old streets, a cinema, an air raid shelter; but on first sight: simply grass.

Linnett, “The Greening of Ballard: A Review of Concrete Island” (1976).

An unvarying light calmed the waiting nettles along the motorway palisade. A few drivers watched me from their cars, demented priest in my white sneakers. I picked up a chalky stone and set out a line of numbered stakes with pieces of driftwood, a calibrated pathway that would carry me to the pedestrian bridge. But as I walked forward they encircled me in a spiral arm that curved back upon itself, a whorl of numerals that returned me to the centre of the field.

Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

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

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

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

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

From the press release:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London has always been a palace of sexual varieties: both the hub of Britain’s sex trade and the chamber in which, since the advent of the printed word, debates about liberty, repression and obscenity have raged and (occasionally) been resolved. It’s the country’s erotic centre – its G-spot, if you will. Which is why Time Out decided it was high time to consider the ways in which sex has been celebrated by London writers down the centuries.

Our Top 30 chart of London’s rudest writers collects, in a single heaving but well-ventilated space, the authors we feel have contributed the most to our understanding of the city’s complex sexual psychology. What do we mean by ‘rude’? Boldly transgressive as well as pornographic (after all, anyone can be pornographic), seductive and titillating as well as obscene and, always, well written.

One of the functions of nostalgia is to purge the past of elements that don’t chime with our limited sense of how people once lived. So it’s salutary, and oddly bracing, to be reminded that dildos were around in the sixteenth century (Thomas Nashe) and that ‘cunt’ (okay, ‘queynte’) was a slang term for female genitalia in Chaucer’s day.

But don’t just take our word for it. Our saucy scribblers come endorsed by some of London’s finest contemporary writers, including Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Will Self and Jilly Cooper.

So put down your whip, unbuckle that gimp mask and let’s begin…

28: JG Ballard
Our foremost chronicler of dystopian modernity, Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. He announced recently that he has advanced prostate cancer and that his latest book, the memoir ‘Miracles of Life’, will be his last.

In his own words
‘The crushed body of the sportscar had turned her into a being of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex.’ (‘Crash’)

Toby Litt (author ‘Corpsing’, ‘I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay’)
‘It’s no discovery, of course, that cars are objects of desire. But it took Ballard to go that logical extra step: if cars are going to get it on, then they need to crash. This isn’t just about Volvo-protected voyeurism, it’s about exchanging body fluids upon impact, it’s about suicidal interpenetrations. Ballard takes thing-sex to the point of polymorphous perversity. Anything can be sexier than sex – buildings, airplanes, deserted swimming pools. Even Shepperton. Or, as Ballard would insist, especially Shepperton.’

Here’s the full list:

1 Walter, aka Henry Spencer Ashbee
2 Alan Hollinghurst
3 Kenneth Tynan
4 Algeron Charles Swinburne
5 Thomas Nashe
6 John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester
7 William Shakespeare
8 Geoffrey Chaucer
9 Gerald Kersh
10 John Cleland
11 Havelock Ellis
12 Hanif Kureishi
13 Sigmund Freud
14 Henry Fielding
15 James Boswell
16 William Wycherley
17 Daniel Defoe
18 Mark Ravenhill
19 Geoff Nicholson
20 Maxim Jakubowski
21 Oscar Moore
23 Sebastian Horsley
24 Molly Parkin
25 Stewart Home
26 Mary Robinson
27 Patrick Marber
28 JG Ballard
29 Lady Caroline Lamb
30 Anthony Neilson

More at Time Out.

And for a different view on the erotic potential of Crash, see here.

+ From Joanne:

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

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

+ From Simon:

Drained swimming pools!

+ From melb psy:

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

rather ‘Running Wild’….

+ From John:

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

+ From Alan:

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

Toilet duct and other diminutive issues
January 23rd, 2008

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

Amenity Space broadcasts every Thursday between 1 and 2pm.

+ From Andy:

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

+ From Anonymous:

Ballard-related exhibition in Barcelona.

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

+ From Darin:

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

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

+ From Greg:

Extreme Ballardian tourism — The Island of Prora:

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

Did Hitler invent mass tourism…?

+ From JD:

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

Some quotes . . .

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

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

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

P.S. Loving Ballardian.com BTW.

+ From Mr. Nobody:

Sex Offenders Set Up Camp

+ From Joe:

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

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

+ From Anonymous:

Greetings, Mr Sellars

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

An interview with Girard is here.

Love The Ballardian!

+ From electric:

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

+ From Peter:

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

+ From Thomas:

cockroaches–first creatures conceived and born in space

+ From Mark:

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

Like the car wash scene from Crash, but wetter.

+ From Henry:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: RETROSPECTO REWIND ::..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This disturbing photo feature focuses on peeping toms in Japan and Kohei Yoshiyuki, the photographer who documented them in the 1970s. Listen to Philip Gefter’s voiceover: he notes the triple trangsression here (eminently worthy of Crash as it so happens), involving the couples who have sex in public, the peeping toms observing them, and the photographer recording it all.

[ Thanks, Ben ]

As GH writes, “This news story, reported in the New York Times, reminded me of several JGB stories, especially those collected in ‘Memories of the Space Age’. The (former) astronauts, the sexual obsession, the abandonment of family, the curious triangle drama; these are familiar motifs. Had one of the people involved been a medical doctor or a psychiatrist, the whole affair would have been downright spooky.”

It’s been a bit quiet around these parts. Sorry. Something’s brewing, though…like a wind from nowhere, sweeping through London Town…

…:: Incoming (soonish)
+ News on next year’s International JG Ballard Conference
+ More interviews exploring the Ballard continuum across time and space
+ Guest posts from guest bloggers

Subscribe for notification of updates as they occur. Meanwhile…

…:: Picking Up the Slack
+ The full transcript of Toby Litt’s recent interview with JGB is now online (a severely truncated version previously appeared in Waterstones magazine). According to Toby, five days before he was due to interview JGB, he received spam with the subject: “Enter: Impress your girl with prolonged hardness, plentiful explosions and increased duration”. He says it was from a spambot calling itself “Ballard”. As JGB himself likes to point out, “Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences”.

..:: Random Gender
+ Here’s a delicious experiment from Matteo Bittanti, who has been experimenting with ‘gamics’, using videogame screenshots to create comics. He’s got good taste: he adapts Ballard’s Crash, using dialogue from the book, with Burnout screen caps (thanks, GameSetWatch).

..:: Synchromesh
+ I found this tantalising tidbit on the IMDB regarding Bruce Robinson’s early script for High-Rise:

Bruce Robinson, who is known mainly for ‘Withnail & I’ and ‘The Killing Fields’, wrote a script for this J. G. Ballard novel in 1979. It is unproduced and unpublished. It is just typical of ‘Hollywood’ to disregard this fact. I’m sure the current writer is good, but Bruce put a lot of work into it. He researched the architectural side of the story, as well as some particularly gruesome torture devices available to ‘ordinary’ people. He was commissioned by Euston Films, ending up writing a $35 million film. It was dumped because Bruce believed it would never be made. Here we are, nearly 30 years later, and it’s due to be released. Please read ‘Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson’ by Alistair Owen, for more about this script.”

I want to know more about these “gruesome torture devices” — sounds a bit like he wanted to turn HR into a slasher pic. Bruce, you reading this mate? Send me your script: maybe we could adapt it here on the site, in a gamic stylee.

..:: Night of the Virtually Dead
+ An enterprising chap has whacked together some found footage, pieced it together with a voice over reading from Ballard’s super-short story, ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’, and bunged the lot up on YouTube. Not too shabby (thanks, Ryan Cole).

————————————————————————————
Lyle Hopwood uncovers a lost Ballard work, apparently the only surviving fragment from JGB’s novelization of David Cronenberg’s film of Alien, before the studio infamously got cold feet and replaced Cronenberg with Ridley Scott and Ballard with Alan Dean Foster.
————————————————————————————

It’s only the cat, Ripley.
Squatting in the brine strained from the ore above, Kane pressed the activation panel of the locker. Startled by the noise of the lock tumblers, the skittish cat bounded over him, causing him to slip on a thin mesentery, a sloughed skin like that of an amphibian dissected by a careless junior doctor. “Catch it, you fool,” Ripley shouted. “It’ll show up on our scanners again.” Ignoring her, Kane shone his torch on the masklike membrane, recognising it as the discarded integument of the final nymph of the Alien. He was unaware of the caudal barb creeping behind him until he was pulled up into the air-duct. He heard Lambert’s irritating hysteria below him as he gazed onto the Alien instar. The moist, immaculate skin of the erect head reminded him of the perineum of a young boy; he felt an almost ceremonial arousal but experienced only the ghost of his orgasm as the buccal ram of the creature shattered his spinal column between the fourth and fifth thoracic verterbrae. As consciousness diminished he relished lying in the warm saline flow of the duct, a simulacrum of his origin unexpectedly recreated in the gulf of space.

Priority Override 1007: Crew Expendable
Holding the data-CD that it had removed from the high-pressure liquid chromatograph, the dismembered robot Ash lay before the three medical display monitors like the sacrificial victim of some digital Cargo Cult. Framing the AI like a triptych of its credo, the three video frames displaying dorsal, ventral and sagittal section of the arachnid-phase Alien called up an impossible geometry, a forbidden angle in which some non-Euclidian Angel could dance only in isolation on the head of a pin. Its injured hands proffered the data, the compositional analysis of the buccal mucus, like a wafer. “The organism, like a moss, has an alternation of generations,” Ash said. “Unlike a moss, both the gametozoon and the sporozoon stages require a living host. The last acts of humanity may be as surrogate mothers for this free-living phallus existing only to impregnate the weak. Darwin and Freud in one jewelled lizard. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, they say. Where does that leave me?”

“History,” said Parker, raising the muzzle of the flamethrower.

The option to override the destruct sequence has expired.
The bolts tethering the shuttle exploded in a series of magnesium flares, strobing the tableau inside, a technological Burgess Shale. Between the bars of darkness a woman stood; her interpatellar distance, an indicator of sexual arousal, increasing with each burst of light; her obsolete mammalian uterus nurturing only the copper worm of her IUD. Beside her the Alien basked in the warm exhaust of the hibernaculum, a confident equilibrium suffusing all its parts, a physical instance of a new paradigm. Instead of some implacable hatred that one zoological class might feel for its usurper, she felt a brisk, matronly efficiency. She replaced the flamethrower in the translucent plastic rack. As the ovipositor sought out and probed the hollow of her solar plexus, the cat’s hiss framed the moment, a Polaroid of the Hieros Gamos of the once and future predicates of sentience. Reaching out, Ripley, the Madonna of the New Flesh, stroked the elongated head of the creature, her fingerprints in the mucus tracing in an unknown alphabet the names of the children of the dead.

————————————————————————————
This piece originally appeared in Interzone #75, September 1993. The blurb from the editor, David Pringle, was as follows:

Thanks to Lyle and David for permission to reproduce it here.
————————————————————————————

OPENING LINE:
“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”

For many, The Atrocity Exhibition is J.G. Ballard’s most important work. It reads like an instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualise technology, as the ‘T’ figure reconfigures the media landscape ‘in a way that makes sense’ — an aesthetic that’s proved to be hugely influential, perhaps more so on artists and musicians than writers.

Is Atrocity a novel or a collection of short stories? Ballard published the Atrocity pieces as standalone stories over a period of four years, while always claiming that he was working towards the big picture: an experimental novel.

Two versions are available: the Flamingo edition, and the large-format RE/Search edition. Both feature annotations from Ballard, although RE/Search’s version is recommended for the gynaecological illustrations from Phoebe Gloeckner.

As Ballardian reader Mike Holliday points out:

The 1990 Re/Search edition added an Appendix with four additional pieces. These comprised three of Ballard’s ‘surgical fictions’ from the 1970s: ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’ (1970), ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’ (1970), and ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Rhinoplasty’ (1976); along with (rather incongruously) a story from the late 1980s, ‘The Secret History of World War 3′.

There was a U.K. large format paperback edition by Harper Collins/Flamingo in 1993; of the additional stories included by RE/Search, only Princess Margaret’s Facelift and Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty were incorporated in this U.K. edition. Subsequent U.K. editions are identical in this respect (though I don’t think I’ve looked at the very latest one).”

From Amazon:

First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of “Crash” and “Super-Cannes”, who has supplied explanatory notes for this new edition. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, pscyhopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.”

I recommend the inimitable Mark Fisher (aka k-punk) for his analysis of Atrocity — dense and theory-driven, but undeniably intelligent and provocative:

In a sense, the phrase “atrocity exhibition” is a strictly literal description of this media landscape as it emerged in the early 1960s, populated by images of Vietnam, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The novel deals with the violence that haemorrhaged in the 1969 in which it was published: Manson, Altamont, War across the USA. But, for Ballard, the events of 1969 are merely the culmination of a decade whose guiding logic has been one of violence; a mediatized violence, where “mediatization” is a profoundly ambiguous term which doesn’t necessarily imply a disintensification. As they begin to achieve the instantaneous speed Virilio thinks characteristic of postmodern communication, media (paradoxically) immediatize trauma, making it instantly available even as they prepackage it into what will become increasingly preprogrammed stimulus-response circuitries.”

Mark Fisher. ‘Flatline Constructs — The Atrocity Exhibition’.

..:: CONTENTS
+ ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1966)
+ ‘The University of Death’ (1968)
+ ‘The Assassination Weapon’ (1966)
+ ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ (1966)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1967)
+ ‘The Great American Nude’ (1968)
+ ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (1969)
+ ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (1969)
+ ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ (1966)
+ ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’ (1966)
+ ‘Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.’ (1968)
+ ‘Crash!’ (1969)
+ ‘The Generations of America’ (1968)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)

Appendix
+ ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’ (1970)
+ ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’ (1970)
+ ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Rhinoplasty’ (1976)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War III’ (1988)

..:: LINKS
+ Excerpt: Chapter 1 — ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’
+ Excerpt: Chapter 5 — ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’
+ Excerpt: Chapter 12 — ‘Crash!’

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ Grand Theft Auto IV: Ballardian atrocities
+ ‘Confronting ourselves’: Ballard and Circular Time
+ ‘An exhibition of atrocities’: J.G. Ballard on Mondo film
+ ‘The fusion of science and pornography’ (WARNING! Exceptionally unsafe for work)
+ ‘Der Visionär des Phantastischen’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld
+ The Ballardian Primer: Car Parks
+ Love among the mannequins
+ J.G. Ballard: The Corridor Interview
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard
+ Atrocity II
+ ‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection
+ The Brangelina Exhibition
+ Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An interview with Iain Sinclair
+ “Thirsty Man at the Spigot”: An Interview with Jonathan Weiss
+ Another Atrocity: A ‘New’ Work by J.G. Ballard
+ Jonathan Weiss: The Atrocity Exhibition
+ The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media
+ William Burroughs: Preface to The Atrocity Exhibition
+ Author’s Note: The Atrocity Exhibition

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

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

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

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

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

Bourke continues:

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

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

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

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

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

———————————————-
JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
———————————————-

To imagine the atrocities of September 11th and Abu Ghraib mimetised in the alternate death of Paris Hilton feels far more unacceptable, because contemporary piety has sacralised its atrocities in a way that the 60s could not. In Atrocity, Dr Nathan’s reminder that, at the level of the unconscious, ‘the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam…may in fact play very different parts from the ones we assign them’ is extremely timely. (As Burroughs tells us in his preface to The Atrocity Exhibition, ‘Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm’.) It is clear that the appalling Abu Ghraib photographs were already intensely eroticised stagings whose scenarios were derived from cheap American pornography. Love and Napalm: Export USA, indeed*. Part of the reason that the Abu Ghraib images were so traumatic for a deeply conflicted American culture which combines religious moralism with hyper-sexualised commerce, and which is united only by a taste for megaviolence, is that they exposed the equation between military intervention and sexual humiliation that the official culture both depends upon and must suppress.

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

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

k-punk

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

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

OPENING LINE:
“Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.”

If The Drowned World was the book which cemented Ballard’s literary reputation (in Britain, at least), then Crash was almost certainly the one which made him a non-entity in America’s eyes. Following on from publisher Nelson Doubleday’s outrage at an earlier Ballard story, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, Crash ensured JGB remained on the periphery of the US sci-fi scene.

In any case, it is doubtful whether this is ‘science fiction’, in the traditional sense. It tells the story of the narrator, ‘James Ballard’, the ‘hoodlum scientist’ Vaughan, and a supporting cast of curiously one-dimensional characters, as they follow their peculiar obsessions along the hyperreal motorways of England. Tuned in to police radios, they descend on the scenes of car crashes, depositing their semen and vaginal mucous on torn flesh and twisted metal. Ultimately, Vaughan desires ‘a union of semen and engine coolant’, splattered in world-wide ‘autogeddon’.

Crash epitomises Ballard’s ‘death of affect’ theories — it is Inner Space in perpetual motion. The media landscape, with its aestheticising of violence, is the novel’s main character. The car, the first and still most recognisable symbol of mass production, provides the eternal metaphor.

Crash was Ballard’s first novel in seven years (The Crystal World from 1966 was the last). Of course he’d been busy writing short stories during that time, and because of that concentrated span many people regard Ballard’s strength as being in the shorter format, even though he’s written novels exclusively for the last 20-odd years.

Crash was the real deal, though, a savage, cool, clinical sex-and-technology masterpiece. Here, Ballard got everything absolutely right: the attitude, the language, the vision, the metaphor (death of affect; media landscapes; dehumanisation), all colliding in a prescient headspin that still has the power to enhrall 32 years on.

I’d argue that Crash saw the first appearance of Ballard’s fully blown ‘catalyst figure’, Vaughan himself, an archetype which Ballard seems to refine in every one of his latter-day novels: the dark, mysterious urban professional liberating the middle-classes by feeding their deepest, darkest psychopathological fantasies.

I have the 1995 Vintage version, with the following blurb:

The cult status of CRASH has intensified since its original publication in 1973, making it a classic of underground literature. In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a ‘TV scientist’ turned ‘nightmare angel of the highways’, experiments with erotic atrocities among crash victims, each more sinister than the last: ultimately, he craves a union of blood, semen and engine coolant in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor.”

There’s a quote from Malcolm Bradbury of the New York Times Book Review on the back cover:

A writer of enormous inventive powers, J.G. Ballard has, like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination.”

Crash is, of course, a staple text in university critical-theory courses; in the 1990s, it was very highly prized indeed. Baudrillard wrote an essay about it, academics overanalysed Ba(udri)llard, and JGB himself accused them all of being “trapped inside their dismal jargon”. Read Nicholas Ruddick’s summary of the aftershock here:

As he gazes at the contemporary scene, Baudrillard notices the same cultural symptoms that Ballard does—affectlessness, apparently meaningless circulation, the sense of impending catastrophe. It is no wonder that Ballard celebrates Baudrillard’s brilliant reading of American culture in America (1986). But whereas Baudrillard celebrates—even if ironically—the “marvelously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts” on American roads (America 5), or America’s orgiastic and ecstatic indifference as a “radical modernity” attained (96-97), for Ballard there remains the project of exposing the real (unconscious) desire beneath the debauch of fiction. Baudrillard the hyperrealist is at his best consciously a poet of the surface of things. In this he is a postmodernist par excellence, and this is, it seems to me, why Ballard, for whom such surfaces are equally fascinating but also terrifying for what they conceal, is so ambivalent toward him. It is surely this ambivalence that causes Ballard to attack, in his “Response to the Invitation to Respond” to Baudrillard’s essays, not Baudrillard, but postmodernism itself.”

Nicholas Ruddick. ‘Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard’.

..:: LINKS
+ Read Ballard’s 1995 introduction to Crash.

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?”

The Unlimited Dream Company is “one of the titles featured in Anthony Burgess’ Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939″.

It’s also one of Ballard’s most surprising and underrated works, and deeply personal, too, given that it takes place in his home town of Shepperton. Substitute the narrator, Blake, for Ballard, then consider Malcolm Bradbury’s insightful review:

For the citizens of Shepperton, Blake performs strange wonders, spinning abundance and exuding sexual energy, drawing them away from their work and into a new world of polymorphous perversity.

From the Triad/Panther edition, 1985:

From the moment Blake crashes his stolen aircraft into the Thames, the unlimited dream company takes over and the town of Shepperton is transformed into an apocalyptic kingdom of desire and stunning imagination ruled over by Blake’s messianic figure. Tropical flora and fauna appear; pan-sexual celebrations occur regularly; and in a final climax of liberation, the townspeople learn to fly.

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPENING LINE:
“Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun.”

I have a real soft spot for The Kindness of Women, an autobiographical work that’s loosely described as a sequel to Empire of the Sun. Here, Ballard is honest, self-deprecating and wildly vivid in laying out the tracks of his adult life. While it’s actually a fictional ‘reimagining’ of Ballard’s life rather than a straight recounting (which is what all autobiographies essentially are, if only they’d care to admit it), Kindness is essential for anyone looking to delve into the motivations behind works such as Crash and the 70s Ballard that has been so mythologised.

And it’s very funny, too, full of keenly applied and intentional humour, like this description of being serviced by a prostitute (p. 250): “Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia.”

I can see Ballard’s wry smile behind the typewriter every time I read this, his passive, avuncular expression tinged with mildly titillated bemusement at the abstraction sex has become.

Some quotes from the Grafton edition:

Ballard is the most modern of writers; his art engages with the artefacts and obsessions of the second half of this century in a manner and with an intensity unmatched by any other writer I can think of. The book is full of memserising writing, classic examples of the Ballard Style, paragraphs and pages that disturb and enthrall… A force is operating in this astonishing book which is hard to resist.”

William Boyd, Daily Telegraph

“It has a brutal spine — plenty of hardware and violence and graphic and clinical sex scenes. But it is also, in its own chilly way, enormously tender and likeable with huge vision and ambition.”

Sunday Times

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

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

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

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

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

A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

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

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

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

..:: CONTENTS

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

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

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

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

More contents to come.

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

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

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call that a missed opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..:: CONTENTS

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

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

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

PENGUIN: You don’t belong to any one school, who do you read or admire?

WILL SELF: I do have some very defined and precise influences on my work and on how I see my work as a writer. Of the post-war writers, I stand most in thrall to J G Ballard, to his vision of an apocalyptic world. A world in which effect and in which feeling is to some extent deadened or even destroyed by alienation and by technology. I think the big difference between me and Ballard is that there are no jokes in his books at all, or at least not intentionally any jokes.

No intentional jokes in Ballard? Maybe not; but his work is full of keenly applied and intentional humour. Here’s a favourite ‘passage’ (oooh err, sounds a bit rude) from Crash: “…she masturbated in the bed beside me in the mornings, thighs splayed symmetrically, fingers grovelling at her pubis, as if rolling to death some small venereal snot…” (p. 180).

Then there’s the description of being serviced in The Kindness of Women: “Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia” (p. 250). I can see Ballard’s wry smile behind the typewriter every time I read these, his passive, avuncular expression tinged with mildly titillated bemusement at the abstraction sex has become.

Granted, these examples aren’t exactly thigh slappers. There’s no punchline. And they’re different in execution (if not conceit) from the classic Self sex farce, typified by this passage from Self’s Cock:

“Carol dreamt that she was an enormous chemical factory; like the ICI refinery near her parents’ house in Dorset. Great twisted ganglia of pipes burst forth from her vagina, some of them emitting vast plumes of dry ice spume, others winking with warning lights protected by metal basketry. Her head was marooned far away on the estuarine sand; her great buttocks were shoved against the concrete causeway. Little men, wearing hard yellow hats and driving little yellow trucks, hovered around her anus and vagina. Carol awoke screaming” (pp. 25-26).

In terms of comedy value maybe it’s like comparing Terry Jones with John Cleese, but Ballard makes me laugh, that’s all there is to it, by underscoring the absurd stylisation sex can descend into.

James “Gags” Ballard does have his critics, though, like Brigette Frase. In her summation of Cocaine Nights (worst book of 1998, according to Brigette), she wrote that it was “a shame that Ballard and his characters are unblemished by any sense of humor. With a nip here and a tuck there, this could have been a really funny novel”.

Thanks to Iain X from the JGB Mailing List for this link, a series of photos taken by a ‘seabee’ stationed on the North Pacific, Micronesian island of Tinian during WWII. As the site’s author, Dan Norton, says, “These photos were developed by my grandfather in his clandestine photo lab he ran while stationed on the island of Tinian.” Many thanks to Dan for allowing me to publish some of them here.

Grandpa Norton’s photos — of mass military graveyards; bombers submerged in sand; the flash of war in a tropical setting — will resonate with anyone familiar with J G Ballard’s war stories. I travelled around Micronesia (Yap, Palau, Pohnpei, Guam, Tinian, Rota, Saipan) last year and was floored by Tinian, this serene place, and its role as the launching pad for the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Atomic Bomb Pits, Tinian, 2005 (Simon Sellars)

On Tinian I was caught off guard in lots of ways. When I went for a skinny deep at a northern beach, I felt safe as I’d not sighted another human being for hours. But the universe conspired; as soon as I emerged naked from the water, a busload of Japanese tourists unloaded right next to my car. Where my clothes were. Women giggled; men looked away. Walking over to my clothes, I waved and tried to act natural. The bus driver, a local, looked me up and down.

‘Hey Little Boy,’ he scoffed. ‘You looking for Fat Man?’

But I was. How did he know? Oh, I see. Very funny. He gave me directions, I got dressed and hightailed it to North Field, Tinian’s abandoned US airbase.

Like Melville in Ballard’s ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, I took photos of all the abandoned runways and bases; the shot above is of the pits where the the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs were loaded into the B29s that destroyed Japan. They’re now covered with plexiglass, to deter souvenir hunters I presume; a man was recently charged with stealing bits of North Field and selling them on the Internet. Or maybe it’s a deterrent to vandals… I took hundreds of shots of the remains of Japanese Zeroes, tanks and anti-aircraft guns in the Micronesian jungle, and I tried to visualise what the islands were like during WWII — Tinian was the world’s busiest air base back then, traffic generated entirely by American war planes. It’s a tiny, tiny place — peaceful and lush — so it’s very hard to imagine.

Dan’s photos fill in some of the gaps. As does Ballard…

“The B-29s which bombed the airfield beside Lunghua Camp, near Shanghai, where I was interned during the second World War, had reportedly flown from Guam. Pacific Islands, with their silent airstrips among the palm trees, Wake Island above all, have a potent magic for me. The runways that cross these little atolls, now mostly abandoned, seem to represent extreme states of nostalgia and possibility, doorways into another continuum.

It was from the island of Tinian, in the Marianas, that the atom bombs were launched against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the war unexpectedly and almost certainly saved the lives of myself and my fellow internees in Shanghai, where the huge Japanese armies had intended to make a last stand against the unexpected American landings”.

– from Ballard’s annotations, JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, RE/Search, 1990, p. 33.

Tinian, WWII, © Dan Norton

Abandoned Japanese Zero, Yap, 2005 (Simon Sellars)

In Micronesia I tapped into other Ballardian currents, especially in Saipan, an island continually lumped in with Guam as a no-culture, overdeveloped resort park for rich Japanese and Americans. It’s said that during WWII, the occupying Japanese forces wiped out the Saipanese villages and the local Chamorro culture and replaced them with facsimile Japanese towns, bars, restaurants. Landing in Saipan today, you’d be forgiven for wondering if they were ever kicked out. Hotel signage and pamphlets are often solely written in Japanese; there’s an abundance of Japanese restaurants and sushi houses; and many of the locals speak at least a smattering of the language.

Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, Banzai Cliff, Saipan, 2005, (Simon Sellars)

In the north, possibly Saipan’s most beautiful region, filled with rolling hills and lush beaches, there are numerous monuments, statues and homages to the war-dead Japanese. There’s a happy-go-lucky atmosphere at these monuments. Busloads of Japanese tourists make the circuit from cannon to cliff, from the early morning to the late afternoon, laughing and joking, taking snaps and enjoying picnics.

At Banzai Cliff I witnessed something extraordinary, the afterimage of which has remained with me ever since. Some background: it was at this cliff where, during the war, hundreds of Japanese families committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Americans. The youngest child would be the first to go, pushed over the edge by the next youngest, and so on, until the mother pushed the last child over. Finally, the father pushed the mother over before he too made a running jump. This story sums up the futility of the Japanese war effort, especially considering the return of the Japanese these days, in greater numbers and as valued customers. Looking over the cliff, I was caught up in mad visions of the raging water swirling below, imagining I was one of those poor children, beginning to understand that I was looking at death.

Banzai Cliff (northern Saipan), 2005 (Simon Sellars)

I heard some giggling: a young Japanese girl dressed in fashionable camouflage pants and cap was posing by one of the monuments, having her photograph taken. OK, that’s what Japanese tourists do; but then she began to pout sexily, twirl her hair seductively, and tilt her head at a come-hither angle. When she slipped her top down to reveal a nipple, the penny dropped. She was either modelling the latest in camo gear and had picked a suitably war-drenched region to pose against, or it was some kind of soft-porn shoot…with a war theme.

I found this odd couple ahead of me at two other monuments — this young, desirable girl and her photographer, an older guy in his forties, dressed like the hip movie director in Lost In Translation, with his baggy pants, blow-waved hair, John-Lennon sunglasses and red baseball cap. At an old WWII Japanese cannon near Banzai Cliff, I watched her mount the weapon then dismount, pouting and pretending to lick the barrel. She was incredibly un-self-conscious, and at one point looked me directly in the eye with a dazzling smile. I was beginning to understand where these pictures would end up; maybe I’ll do a Google search in a few months time (something like ‘saipan banzai nipple gun barrel’) and all will be revealed.

Hotel Nikko (northern Saipan), 2006 (Simon Sellars)

On the way to Banzai Cliff is the Hotel Nikko Saipan, especially notable for its futuristic design: the architects must have modelled the Nikko on the domed city from the ’70s sci-fi film Logan’s Run. Clearly this luxury hotel was meant to herald in a tourist-driven utopia that would transform Saipan. There’s no doubt that Saipan is very popular with the Japanese, but not nearly as much since the bottom fell out of the Asian economy a few years back. The local Chamorros seem to have traded in their cultural heritage for a stake in this consumer-driven utopia, only for the gamble to backfire. Even more so than Guam, there’s a fully devolved Chamorro culture in Saipan, replaced by the rusted hulks of abandoned shopping centres.

Across the road from the Nikko is one of these burnt-out shells, the La Fiesta shopping centre. The Lonely Planet guidebook touted this as a major hub, but things have obviously changed in the five years since the book was written. The La Fiesta was like San Francisco at the start of another ’70s sci-fi flick, The Omega Man: there were cars and other technological signs of civilisation, but no indication whatsoever of human life. I wandered around for a good ten minutes, staring at abandoned Japanese restaurants and computer-less Internet cafes filled with wires and cables, before I saw another person. A man – stepping from the shadows, well-dressed and genial. He smiled and winked at me, then disappeared into an office. I was spooked. An apparition? But there were other people, busily typing away at their desks. I discovered another office, with more actual people, but the whole centre was infused with a dank melancholy. I couldn’t help but think that these office workers — like the last survivors of a nuclear war, holed up underground and trying to restart civilisation on a scorched Earth — were clinging to Saipan’s dreams of a tourist utopia, desperately trying to kick-start the economy all by themselves…

La Fiesta Shopping Centre (northern Saipan), 2006, (Simon Sellars)

>>>>>>>>>>

“These illustrations of the Pacific atoll, with its vast concrete runways, he had collected over the previous months. Melville’s real interest had been in the island itself, a World War II airbase and now refuelling point for trans-Pacific passenger jets. The combination of scuffed sand and concrete, metal shacks rusting by the runways, the total psychological reduction of this man-made landscape, seized his mind in a powerful but ambiguous way.
…
Melville prowled along the mantelpiece of the beach-house, slapping the line of photographs. ‘Look at those runways, everything is there. A big airport like the Wake field is a zone of tremendous possibility — a place of beginnings, by the way, not ends’.
…
He resolved to make his world-wide journey, externally to Wake Island, and internally across the planets of his mind”.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, 1974.

>>>>>>>>>>

Distressed B29, Tinian, © Dan Norton 2006

From Playboy:

“Crash by J.G Ballard (1973)

Plot: Group of Londoners discovers that they are turned on by automobile crashes. Scars become a new erogenous zone.

Why it’s on the list: Ballard’s 1973 tour de force weds the sexual with the industrial. He imagines the body is branded by the metal parts of an automobile “like the contours of a woman’s body remembered in the responding pressure of one’s own skin for a few hours after a sexual act,” and his work yields remarkable energy and obsession.

Excerpt: Catherine visited me. She would soap her hand from the toilet bar in its wet saucer inside my cupboard, her pale eyes staring through the flower-filled window as she masturbated me….

Did Catherine respond to the…dark bruises of my body and the physical outline of the steering wheel? In my left knee the scars above my fractured patella exactly replicated the protruding switches of the windshield wipers and parking lights. As I moved towards my orgasm she began to soap her hand every ten seconds, her cigarette forgotten, concentrating her attention on this orifice of my body like the nurses who attended me in the first hours after my accident. As my semen jerked into Catherine’s palm she held tightly to my penis, as if these first orgasms after the crash celebrated a unique event.”

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballardian presents an exclusive interview with Jonathan Weiss, director of The Atrocity Exhibition, the film based on the J.G. Ballard collection of ‘condensed novels’.

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NOTE: This is a revised and expanded version of the original interview. The new additions are a reworked introduction, the addition of notes, and the inclusion of JW’s original, lengthier reply to one question (which I missed the first time around; see the note), plus my follow-up response and JW’s follow-up response. See the postscript for more background to this interview. SS
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When film adaptations of JG Ballard’s work are discussed, it’s Crash and Empire of the Sun that grab the headlines. And then there’s Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition. For ages, JGB watchers have speculated about this film — because it’s had just a few screenings since its completion six years ago, it’s gathered a thick crust of secrecy. Weiss, working with very limited resources, oversaw a stop-start production that unfurled over a number of years. Originally running at 105 minutes, the film was edited down to its present 90-minute form after its screening at the 1999 Slamdance festival. And that was pretty much it for The Atrocity Exhibition — it never had a theatrical release, was never marketed. Very few people have seen it. But now, thanks to the Dutch company Reel 23, which recently released this buried work on DVD, we can finally see what Weiss was up to — as Andrés Vaccari did in his review of the DVD for Ballardian.

And now here it is, flawed, fatal and totally flammable — the Jonathan Weiss Interview.

– Simon Sellars

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All images © Jonathan Weiss and Reel 23
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How did you first come across Atrocity Exhibition, the book?

I had been hunting for the book for a long time, maybe without even knowing it. I never went to film school and initially had no desire to be a filmmaker in the traditional sense. I had been making some truly ‘experimental’ films (I usually hate that term) in that I really was experimenting with film structure looking for what worked, what did not. I started to realise that the duration of short films might be posing inherent problems for what I had in mind. But I found very few feature length films that did what I was interested in, perhaps only Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and a bit in some of the Derek Jarman Super 8 films blown up to 35mm, like Last of England.

And then somehow I found the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, and I knew in about two pages that I had the book I was looking for. It was absolutely perfect. It was already a shooting script for a film, but since Ballard was an author, he called it a book. I had read other Ballard works, but of course they are totally different from The Atrocity Exhibition, which is the ultimate distillation of his thinking, rendered in a poetically scientific style.

How did you approach Ballard?

I wrote a letter to his agent asking for permission to use the text to do a Super 8 version. I received some sort of vague permission, which would have been worth entirely nothing later. But the film became a real production, as people who were commercial entities in New York City at the time found out about what I was doing and begged to sign on. You cannot believe how enthusiastic people were to help me make it into a ‘real’ film — something that could be projected from 35mm in a typical movie house. So we just made it. It reminds me of the children’s book, Stone Soup: you start making a cauldron of soup with nothing but stones and water, but if you do it right, at the end it’s filled with vegetables and meat.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

At the end of the filming process, when we had a rough cut that was close to the finished version, a friend from England who knew Ballard’s daughter offered to deliver a copy of the VHS to him. He called a few days later to report it delivered. The next day, I heard my wife at the time, Anna Juvander, who plays many roles in the film, screaming. I went to see what the ruckus was about. She was standing by the fax machine, shaking, reading a fax. It was the first one from Ballard, praising the movie. The next day, I kid you not, we received another. He loved it. He loved it so much, in fact, that when I read the faxes I thought, ‘Maybe he’s not quite right any longer’. I was not ready for him to call the movie ‘a poetic masterpiece’ — I would have been happy just hearing that he could watch it in one sitting, or something similar.

We subsequently were able to buy the rights, very reasonably, because of that. In the nick of time, too, as Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa company were after it. I shudder to think what would have happened if JGB did NOT like the movie. Moral of this story: don’t ever, ever, ever do anything as stupid as making anything without getting the rights, in stone, for one million years minimum.

Did Ballard have any input into the film?

JGB indeed helped after the film was finished with a suggestion for a little introductory sequence, which makes the film a tad bit more accessible. I liked the inaccessible opening, but saw the wisdom in his approach. Other than that, he essentially rubberstamped the film with his good wishes.

What was the funding structure like? Was it entirely private?

You are obviously not an American. There is NO such thing as public money for this kind of film in the USA. There might be public money for making a documentary about Eskimos with Down Syndrome, but not for features. That is one reason why American film is the way it is and why other countries’ films are, also, the way they are.

Why did you cut 30 minutes from the original running time?

We took out all the good parts. Like the serious sex and violence.

OK, but why?

Just kidding. I did have a funny interlude with the head of programming for the Sundance Channel, who wanted to buy the film but wondered whether the few frames (less than one second) of hard-core penetration would make it through corporate headquarters. I suggested I replace the footage, because it did not have to be penetration to do what I wanted in that scene. She looked at me like I was a naughty child: how dare I contemplate ‘compromising’ a work of art by self-censoring it. So I said, ‘Fine, leave it in’. She was fired or left the station soon after, anyway. The porn is still there. We just did some necessary editing. I am happy with the length of the final version of the film. Longer was not better.

The film took a number of years to complete. How did you maintain the look and feel over time?

Formaldehyde works wonders. The film took more than a year to shoot, mainly because the shooting schedule coincided with the worst winter in about one hundred years. The editing took forever and went through three different editing houses, because we had no money — it was done as a labour of love, and love runs out.

How did Reel 23 come into the picture?

They liked the film.

That’s it? You suggested to me that the parent company, Filmfreak, actually created Reel 23 so your film could finally be seen. That must have been a huge boost to your confidence.

The people at Filmfreak and Mr Ballard have been the only bright spots on an otherwise very depressing and bleak landscape since making the film. The problem, of course, is that the film is SO very different from other films that to sell it you need to differentiate it from the rest of the stuff in the store. To do this the wonderful people at Filmfreak really went out on a limb and made a very risky investment to market Atrocity and, importantly, other films like it or in the same spirit. This includes very different material, like David Cronenberg’s first films. They had Atrocity subtitled in most languages necessary for a wider release and even had the master made for a NTSC DVD, which to date is waiting for the right distributor to take on the film for America. They’re a European company and not in a position to do distribution for the USA and Canada.

How do you feel about your home audience missing out?

It’s tragic.

Are you being sarcastic?

Wouldn’t you be sarcastic about the prospects of finding distribution for a tiny Ballard adaptation in the ultra-commercial, competitive American market if the main Ballard website thoroughly trounced your film? It’s like asking a thirsty man if he wants something to drink, whilst turning the spigot off. I was at an event a week ago that precipitated this — where someone asked if I had read Vaccari’s review of my film. It was clear from my conversation with them just how damaging this is to TAE in terms of finding a distributor. You may not think so, but you are not in the film business, to my knowledge.

You may not realize the irony of the situation, but having started TAE at the age of 25, (I turned 42 yesterday), I now find myself having to try and undo the damage that some two-bit clod has perpetrated, so that some people might still want to see my film. You talk about the “dire” situation of film in Australia, due to a lack of funding, you say.

[ NOTE: I mentioned to Weiss that I have interviewed many independent filmmakers here in Australia. I told him this mainly in an attempt to establish some kind of common ground -- also to express sympathy with him and with the concomitant plight of independent filmmakers working with extremely scarce resources. I needn't have bothered. Jonathan refused to meet me halfway, and my attempt was swiftly used against me. ]

Do you realize that the problems with film, on the level of something like my film, for example, are far more complex than getting the government to give you some cash? Imagine working for more than 15 years on a difficult, little film which one would expect at least Ballard fans to appreciate. Then having some ham-fisted moron who authoritatively pronounces Ballard to be “outmoded” in his thinking (on a “Ballardian” website, no less) trashing the film as being “dated” because it does not mention Britney Spears and Paris Hilton!

NOTE: Andrés mentioned Britney and Paris, in his comment after the review, as an example of how cultural icons become dated, not of how Weiss’s film is dated; he never calls for either woman’s inclusion in the film and to suggest otherwise is a clear misrepresentation. Also, Andrés never calls Ballard outmoded; rather he suggests that the one book, Atrocity, has not worn as well as some of JGB’s other works. I don’t agree with that, but it’s Andres’s opinion and he’s entitled to it.

Don’t you feel embarassed publishing that? Would you really want to have a drink with Jim after he read that? What would you say to him? Something like, “Sorry to publish that blather, but its not my opinion. Really.”

[ NOTE: That's 'Jim Ballard', in case you're wondering. ]

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment, Simon. Your website, and others like it, are about the only portal through which prospective audiences for TAE will likely travel. At the moment, the world walks the Google path and the first place they are going to start is yours, as far as this is concerned. Google “Atrocity Exhibition” and film and see where you go. For most people the first stop, with an authoritative name like Ballardian, is also going to be their last. How many people who read the review will go to the trouble of trying to see TAE? I would not waste my time, if I were the usual sort, having read such a cursory dismissal of not only the film but the book itself.

[ NOTE: I can't wear this charge. I never look at one review when deciding whether to see a film; I always like to gather a range of opinions, and as far as I can tell that's a pretty normal attitude... By this stage I was getting thoroughly tired of Jonathan’s attempts to bully us into giving him a favourable review, tired of him belittling my journalistic credentials, tired of him abusing my colleague despite repeated requests to stop, and tired of this website bearing the brunt of being the only site to review Weiss’s film. I suggested to him that he publish his own website devoted to the damned thing. Jonathan could then shape public opinion the way he wanted to shape it. As it is, Reel23’s graphics-intensive Atrocity page does him no favours — with no text, merely images of text, it is nowhere to be found on Google. In this day and age of instant access and instant publishing, Jonathan really has only himself to blame for Google searches returning at No. 1 anything other than the official, sanctioned Atrocity product. ]

In short, I think you have done a disservice to the only small, independent film ever made of one of Ballard’s works, and you worry about the “dire” condition of film? Rather ironic. I would be extremely suprised if either you or Mr Vaccari ever gave any thought whatsoever about the effects of your actions on a film like this. Mr Vaccari’s motivations seem clear — this is his little moment of authority and attention. Your motives escape me.

Reading what you have up now, you would never even know what Ballard himself (namesake of your site, remember) thought of the film, which is quite extraordinary. Most authors quietly hate what is done with their work on film.

I’m sorry the review played a part in your decision to not contact distributors, but neither I nor Andres should feel any responsibility or obligation to you in that regard. What if a major newspaper like the Guardian published a negative review in their online section? What then? You really need to get out of the trap of thinking that this site has some kind of obligation to publish a positive review of your film. I’m sorry to say, but I don’t run a Ballard ‘fan site’. I am as interested in publishing critical opinions of Ballard’s work and related products (like film versions) as I am in praising the man. The site is not hagiography.

Would you care to expand upon your responses to Andres’s criticisms? It would seem he is not alone in voicing some of these points. Other reviewers make similar claims, like this one.

Anyone who thinks that the world depicted in The Atrocity Exhibition has been rendered obsolete in anything but its decorative attributes is severely deluded. That review suggests I ‘made a grave error’ in thinking that the content of Atrocity is still relevant. So what is that content: that we DON’T live in a pervasive media landscape where reality checked out long ago? That we are not obsessed and consumed by psychopathologies that create and determine our relationships with ourselves, our family and friends, our celebrities, our governments? That our cars and other vehicles stopped having polyperverse identities, and are no longer sexualised fetish objects? Has sex itself receded from the flood plains of our time and gone back to its purely procreative origins?

The problem is that as subsequent generations are born into this upside-down world, they see it as normal and natural. It is not. They see the wardrobe, props and sets change and use these ephemera as a surveyor sets his stakes.

NOTE: Weiss originally emailed me the following ‘postscript’, which I missed the first time around, but which I recently discovered at the bottom of another message. I’m publishing it here, for completeness’ sake.

Mr Vaccari’s contention that the book, the film, or both, are “dated”, seems to be making two points. One is that the film belongs to a certain specific historical period (I assume the late 60s) and that is bad. It’s bad to be dated. Which means that all historical films, for example, anything that tries or simply does evoke a period is bad (TAE, by the way, does not do that as a matter of course). Bad meaning dated. Toss all Merchant Ivory, not because it’s sickly film culture, but because it’s historical, it’s dated, thus it’s bad. Toss Andrei Rublev, too, I would assume. Where we stop tossing, I don’t know.

The second point pertaining to this line of attack would be that the references themselves, being historic, are dated and getting old and grey. They don’t work anymore, don’t have the power they used to. Nobody can identify with Marilyn Monroe anymore (excepting yesterday’s Wall Street Journal dated April 10 06, discussing the economics of control over her image). Mr Vaccari must know this problem himself from rereading his own torturous attempt at recreating Ballardian fictional prose and style in “Chariots of Fire”, a delightful piece I found on his website, using Princess Di to “update” things a bit from Ballard’s “dated” original. Actually, if truth be told, Mr Vaccari has quite the hard on for Atrocity Exhibition, despite his professed disdain, as he copies it yet again in form and function in the wonderful short bit, “Why I Want to Fuck John Howard,” a real treat and topical to boot.

But back to Mr Vaccari’s major point of criticism — the point of referencing. References function in a myriad of ways, and no film, nor any work of art, can possibly be divorced from the culture and icons which comprise it. People have no problem watching films set in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc. Why? Because whether a film is good or not has nothing to do with the period in which it is set or the references it contains. If you needed a Rosetta Stone to watch the film, that would be another story.

There’s an interesting quote over at Senses of Cinema: ‘Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair have never done anything so vulgar as attempting to “adapt” a Ballard fiction. They understand too well that we now live in the landscape that Ballard has been faithfully anatomising and populating with characters since the 1960s. Why bother ‘adapting’ when you can hit the motorway and find all the sets, the actors, and the (CCTV) camera positions ready and waiting for you?’

Mr Petit and Mr Sinclair do not make feature films. They make arthouse installations, but call them ‘films’. Here’s an IMDB comment on their London Orbital: ‘Pompous, pretentious, meaningless and totally pointless’. Maybe they should try being vulgar next time. Since you bring up Mr Sinclair, please note that his BFI book on Cronenberg and Ballard [also called Crash] was so filled with fabrications and outright lies in its discussion of my film, still then a work in progress, that when I spoke to JGB about it he was as appalled as I was. That some of the self-appointed gatekeepers of ‘avant-garde’ culture in the UK, and, for that matter, Ballard’s work, have to invent things about The Atrocity Exhibition, as Sinclair did, suggests another agenda at work.

That shocks and surprises me. Do you want to set the record straight and point out exactly what Sinclair got wrong?

Sinclair invented erroneous figures for how much the film cost and where the money went — having NEVER having talked to me or communicated with me in any way. I even called Ballard as some of the errors were actually attributed to him. JGB assured me that these things were fabricated and indicated he had his own issues with the veracity of the book.

I can live with a so-called serious author trying to belittle my little film, in a book on a relatively big film by Cronenberg, by saying it cost a fraction of what it did, and that the money was spent in a trivial way, et cetera. What I cannot abide by was Sinclair’s central premise: that all filmic adaptations of serious literary work have to be divorced in spirit from their progenitors. If not, Sinclair insists, they have no integrity. Well, I consider Ballard to be a very good judge of things like integrity. Ballard loved the film and has been the film’s biggest support. But Sinclair could not mention that, because his premise and his pay check was to write a book praising Cronenberg’s take on Ballard, which compelled him, I assume, to denigrate my approach.

Why would Sinclair do that? Because you’re from outside the UK? I haven’t read the book; I’m just speculating…

The problem, well understood in academia and minor cultural zones like this, boils down to territoriality. The stakes, understood in terms of money or power, are miniscule. This breeds the worst kind of petty territorialism, where supposedly intelligent adults behave like spoiled children not wanting to share their sandbox. I assume Mr Sinclair, who later went on to try and make a Ballardian film with a small budget himself, was trying, like a dog pissing on a hedge, to mark off his own little fiefdom. The fact that some unknown American with no pedigree had actually made a full-length adaptation of the most difficult-to-adapt book Ballard ever wrote, and having Ballard LIKE the movie, may have pissed off some people in the UK, Sinclair included.

I also, in retrospect, now think the same of Mr Vaccari’s very strange dismissal of both the book and my film, as he has obviously been inspired enough by The Atrocity Exhibition to write his own undisguised copies of parts of the book.

NOTE: I have since read Sinclair’s book and I cannot see how it could have provoked such a reaction. As Tim Chapman mentions in the comments at the end of this interview, Weiss’s film is barely mentioned in Sinclair’s book, but even so Sinclair actually notes that Ballard praises the film. Tim has reproduced the relevant excerpts in the comments section: see it and decide.

Have you ever confronted Sinclair?

I would not know how to reach him let alone expect him to come clean. If you fabricate a bunch of garbage and someone confronts you with your malfeasance, would you expect contrition?

I had a similar thing happen at the same time with the BBC. They had requested a copy of my film to include in a program about adaptations of Ballard’s work. I was thrilled, of course. Imagine my shock when they used footage from my film as if the BBC had shot it, with no context and no proper acknowledgement of my film. They even used an actor to narrate OVER my film, from the book! No mention at all that I had made The Atrocity Exhibition. When I demanded an explanation and retraction, it was a month later and all I got was a curt letter admitting what they had done and removing my footage from their piece.

This is how even the BBC behaves with small films. It’s truly shameful, and no one cares.

Is a Ballardian aesthetic still needed in film and literature these days? Is Ballard’s worldview still relevant?

If it was not relevant, why operate a Ballard website? Nostalgia?

The question isn’t whether I think a Ballardian aesthetic is relevant today, but whether you do. Do you? I’m not attacking you; I’m genuinely interested in your answer.

Ballard’s work is essentially dystopic. Its subject is the world gone wrong, usually a slightly-in-the-future world which makes the whole thing easier for the reader to accept. In the last several decades, the Ballardian project has become centred on the decline of a value system which has held sway for Western Civilisation for centuries, even millennia. What is supplanting this value system — something extremely nihilistic — Ballard seems to see very clearly and be able to capture in his work. I felt that is true in The Atrocity Exhibition, and I feel it compelling his most recent work, perhaps even more strongly. Very few authors have the ability to both sense and capture this seismic change. He is a philosopher as much as an artist. Thus his aesthetic, his thinking, is more relevant than ever.

That does not even begin to come to terms with Ballard’s prescription for the malady, which is truly, majestically radical. It can be summarised, perhaps, by not rejecting or resisting the process of decline, but by abetting it.

Because your film deliberately subverts traditional narrative and contains some fairly disturbing imagery, people perceive it as ‘difficult’ viewing. Did that make it hard to market the film? How did audiences initially react to it?

The film has never had a theatrical release. And perhaps it should be that way, given the ‘vulgarity’ (to use the word properly) of film marketing and the realities of theatrical distribution today, worldwide. Where the hell is it supposed to play? At my local multiplex? I can count all of the theatres in New York City that play other films such as this on the fingers of one hand, with a few fingers left over. It’s not exactly March of the Penguins, now, is it? The film was never marketed because marketing requires money, hiring a publicist, et cetera. We never had the money to do that. I was hoping that a few influential critics or cultural figures (besides Ballard) would help the film in that regard, but I was mistaken. This website constitutes marketing, because the readers here are the core audience for the film, and look at how well that is going.

As for being difficult, if people call a film difficult, then it becomes so. I have had numerous instances of people showing up at private screenings with NO idea of what the film would be, dragged there by a friend, with no warning. At the end of a typical screening, it is usually very, very quiet. For some minutes. People are usually very still. They are in some kind of other state — maybe it’s shock, but I don’t think it’s that. Quite frequently, people who have nothing to do with the film business, or the culture world generally, are the best viewers, the ones who get the most from the film — the ones who understand the most, precisely because they THINK the least. The most difficult aspect of the film is actually seeing it.

Was the 1999 Slamdance screening the first?

The film first showed at Rotterdam in 1998, as a work in progress. As for festivals in general, they are not very good places to expect people to seriously watch films. They are essentially big parties, or rather disgusting, stupid, frenzied greed fests with people desperately running around, literally, looking for the next indie film that could make them a few million bucks. Considering that the problem with indie film (meaning everything save studio megaliths) today is the utter triumph of the worst kind of commerciality, it is really pathetic to see adults spend the kind of energy they do in the film world to make a few, paltry bucks. If you want to be a capitalist, it’s such small change.

You could, for example, be a hedge-fund manager and make in one year the total gross of all of those films. Then you could finance or even make yourself any films you wanted, and not give a shit how much money they made or lost. Obviously, the rewards are elsewhere.

You co-wrote the script with Michael Kirby [who also plays Dr Nathan in the film]. How did the working process between the two of you evolve?

Normally, a script is extremely important, as a film is about characters and you understand them through dialogue and action. The Atrocity Exhibition is very different. It is about places, space — meaning architectural space — time, events, unusual forms of consciousness, et cetera. There is no narrative. A non-narrative film. How do you make a ‘non-narrative’ film? They don’t teach you that in film school, which I had no interest in going to, anyway. You cannot read books or magazine articles on this subject. Michael, who was a very smart man, realised that the best approach for a book and a project like this is to create the illusion of a narrative.

People are so thoroughly conditioned in narrative, they will project it ANYWHERE they can. Everyone who watches The Atrocity Exhibition will construct a narrative of their own, and I have never heard two that were identical. Some viewers become quickly frustrated by the lack of narrative and think of it as a personal affront, an insult to their intelligence. Since they do not ‘get it’ because they are looking for ‘it’ in the wrong place, they become upset and dismiss the film. But others, who just let it flow over them, have reported experiences usually found during serious drug episodes, extended periods in isolation tanks or other attempts to get beyond the purview of quotidian consciousness. I guess that means Michael was on to something.

I wrote my part of the script visually, seeing the scenes happen. Michael did most of the dialogue, which is often lifted from the book. We were not looking for a ‘natural’ effect, but it might be worth noting that I spent most of my time directing the actors to stop acting, and deliver their few lines in as natural a way as possible. Michael did most of his writing for the Wooster Group, a very famous theatre company in SoHo, New York — funny how no one complains that the Wooster Group, people like Willem Dafoe, are doing non-narrative stuff.

The best way to look at dialogue in the film is like traffic signs for a motorist. They are there to keep you from getting lost — or worse.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

The film is full of striking imagery — in parts it plays almost like a photo-roman. Do you have a photographic background? Is Chris Marker’s La Jetee an influence on your work?

I adore that film, and often wonder why so little came after it in the same vein. As for imagery, my issue with cinema is that it is not about film, it’s just filmed theatre — if you want to do film, it’s about the image. So if you make a non-narrative film, what is on the screen had better be compelling visually. Other than my sensibility, I have no photographic background and am a crap photographer.

Many people are surprised to learn that’s there’s a film version of The Atrocity Exhibition. How does it feel being the father of the ‘bastard child’ of JGB film adaptations? How do you see your film in relationship to David Cronenberg’s Crash and Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun?

I don’t see any relationship with those films.

Right, but what I’m getting at is this: do you feel your film has suffered unfavourably when Ballardian adaptations are discussed, considering you were up against the King of Hollywood on one side and the Indie King on the other?

It would be nice if people could just watch my film for what it is and not compare it to something as heterogeneous as the other Ballard films. But that does not usually happen, and considering the hostility to The Atrocity Exhibition, I have to wonder why? What is so threatening about this film? It has nothing in common with the other films — is that the issue? I truly do not know myself.

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition

I see some similarities. Just as the Atrocity book seems a prototype of Ballard’s novel Crash — a prequel in many ways — I wondered if you saw your film as serving that function to Cronenberg’s Crash. There seem to be similar stylistic choices: the blue light bathing some scenes; Victor’s acting as ‘T’, which seems to share mannerisms and tics with Elias Koteas in Crash; Anna’s Novotny, again sharing traits with Holly Hunter in Crash; the framing of scenes in car parks and so on. Or are such similarities merely functions of Ballard’s writing and its remarkable consistency?

Just to set the record straight, I shot The Atrocity Exhibition BEFORE Cronenberg shot Crash, so there is no possibility of influence from his film, nor would I copy his look, because I never liked Cronenberg’s cinematography, though I like some of his earlier films, like Videodrome. Anything shared between the two films is due to the books emerging one from the other, as Cronenberg, ‘parasite’ that he is (to use your fellow reviewer’s terminology) also lifted the exact same lines from Crash as I used in Atrocity. Ballard actually repeated material word for word in both books.

Cronenberg took a literal, ‘narrative’ approach to another supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Naked Lunch. Now, on the DVD’s commentary track you say you had no idea how to film Ballard’s ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ scene, and so you went for the most literal approach [in the film, T has sex in an automobile with Karen Novotny as she wears a Ronald Reagan mask]. But wouldn’t a literal approach have simulated some kind of mental therapy group, with patients masturbating over pictures of Ronald Reagan?

The issue, which keeps coming up in the comparisons with Cronenberg, is that I am literal in my adaptation of Ballard, but in fact Cronenberg is not. Just as he was not in Naked Lunch. Read that book and tell me that it is anything like the text. My problem is simple: Naked Lunch or The Atrocity Exhibition are essentially exceptional vehicles, which if read properly, will take you someplace very different from what is considered normal life. Cronenberg’s very style, which is extremely mainstream from a cinematographic and editing point of view, will always be at odds with his subject matter, at least when it comes to a book like Crash. To me, that is a fatal flaw. If you want to ride the vehicle to the end of the line, it has to be stylistically consistent or at least not fighting the material, the essence of what is being portrayed. I thus had to use a style as extreme as the book itself, something Cronenberg NEVER does. All his films look the same to me, visually speaking, the only difference being that over the years they got a bit slicker and better produced.

Anna Juvander as Karen Novotny in The Atrocity Exhibition

Regarding my ‘literal’ approach to the Reagan scene, I simply ask myself, ‘What is really happening here — in the text?’ People are in a constant sexual flux, consistent with the chaos of images we have created for ourselves, continuously overlaying images over objects and vice versa, often to sexual ends. In the film, there are scenes where ‘literally’ people are confused as to what is more ‘real’ — the image of a thing or the thing itself.

You’re keen for me to emphasise to our readers that Ballard was totally sold on your vision of the film. But Ballard was also keen on Empire of the Sun and Crash. So, it seems to me that Ballard would rubberstamp any filmed version of his work. Obviously, though, his reaction means a lot to you. Can you tell us a bit more about your relationship with Jim?

This is a tricky subject. As it is no mystery what I think of the films you mention, it may seem contradictory that I actually believe what JGB thought of my film. With Empire, Ballard was paid a lot of money and had access to a huge new audience for his work. If I were Ballard, I would not be complaining about Cronenberg, either. Ballard is certainly not biting the hand that feeds him. I honestly don’t know what Jim said about Crash. I know he was generally positive, but I never discussed the other films or directors with him. I thought that crass. I do not, however, see what Jim could possibly gain from spouting a bunch of goo about my film. He was very clear, for example, in those initial faxes, that he thought the film might fall irretrievably between the cracks. In private, he completely dismissed other attempts to film his work. So I believed him, and especially so since he did the DVD commentary, something to my knowledge he has not done for either of the other films. There is really no motivation, in this instance, for Ballard to fluff The Atrocity Exhibition. Unless you think he is some senile old geezer who just loves anyone making a film, however bizarre, of his work.

If I have to choose who, as an authority and a critic, to listen to regarding Atrocity, I will choose Ballard and not chimps like Vaccari and Sinclair. Since I gather your readers might follow my inclination, I noted the omission of Jim’s positive comments in the negative criticism of Vaccari and Sinclair, whose motives I find suspect on a host of counts — such as the fact that they are both guilty of trying to make really bad versions of Ballardian film or writing.

The two commentaries on the DVD (yours and Ballard’s) suggest there was a great deal of congruence between your interpretation of the book and Ballard’s views on his own text. Was there any area or aspect of the book where you found Ballard’s interpretation substantially at odds with your own?

I must be the most sheep-like of all possible interpreters of Ballard’s work, as I found no place I was at variance with the material I worked upon. Because of this, some reviewers enjoy using the term ‘parasitic’ in discussing my approach. A parasite, however, is defined by its negative effect on its host. JGB has yet to voice his objections.

My DVD copy is very grainy. Is that a deliberate effect?

You need a better TV set.

The set I have is just fine. The grainy texture merges the filmed footage with the archival film — it’s a good effect. So, is that a deliberate effect or a bad transfer?

I spent a great deal of time in pre-production choosing film stocks, lenses and exposure settings to create a very different film look, almost a vintage look, a bit like the visual texture of some of Tarkovsky’s films (I am only talking about the texture or grain here.) We used an Agfa stock, discontinued about when the film commenced shooting, which looks completely different from Kodak or Fuji, what everyone else uses. Same with the black and white, which was Ilford.

Would a bigger budget have changed the film? Would you have retained the archival footage?

I set out to make a film that I had never seen before. That much I accomplished. Having no money made it a much better, more interesting film than if I were better endowed. I moved out of Manhattan and found a large, industrial loft space in a very bad area of Brooklyn where I could shoot and live at the same time. That enabled a much different mode of production, where I could actually cook for my crew while a shot was being setup, for example. It was far more human, less hurried and stressed. It’s hard to work on a train when it’s doing 60mph, they say, and it’s true.

The archival footage was an interest of mine long before making the film. With the book, I found an ideal project to put such material to work. There is a very special psychological effect that comes from using decontextualised real footage, even after our little reality TV epidemic. When you view plastic surgery footage, or car crash simulations with dead bodies, outside the context of a documentary or program on that subject, the result is entirely different from watching the same material with a narrator droning on. The archival footage I used in Atrocity, which required months of searching in US government archives, brought another level to the film, one that could not have been achieved in any other manner. All the footage I used, by the way, was obtained gratis, contrary to what Mr Sinclair wrote in his book, where he asserts that my film’s budget was consumed by purchasing archival footage.

North American directors are all over Ballard film adaptations, but to me much of Ballard’s work is especially British. Obviously, much of his work is set in Britain, but there’s also a peculiar kind of British reserve regarding issues of class and sexuality that JGB appears to be sending up. Any thoughts on that?

I don’t see the book I adapted as having much to do with these issues. I actually went to University at London School of Economics, and understand what you mean in terms of British pomposity and sexual repression, but don’t find it relevant in this instance.

In your DVD commentary, you say that people watch narrative films to escape their ‘dull, boring’ lives? Isn’t that a little patronising?

Is it really patronising, or just true? Do you think I was talking about everyone else’s life whilst my own is so brimming full of excitement, sex, violence and generally interesting conflicts that culminate in highly satisfying denouements? Come on.

The modern world is replete with slaves: you have office slaves, factory slaves, agricultural slaves. The ones who have enough money to spend on two hours of escape go to the movies. That includes, of course, the rich, bored slaves, too, of which there are plenty. In fact, in 20th-century terms, just about everyone leads dull, boring lives, as seen relative to the lives of people like Tom, Brad and Angelina, whose real lives are mythologised on checkout-stand magazines so that the illusion is complete and pervasive.

Just go back to the film:

Traven: ‘Don’t you want to be in the movies, Karen?’
Karen Novotny: ‘We’re all in the movies’.

Are there any current directors at all whom you feel kinship with? Or do you feel that you’re at the vanguard of a new sensibility?

I would suggest that I am merely a leftover from an older sensibility, of directors inconceivable today. Unfortunately Tarkovsky died prematurely and all the other directors I admire, like Antonioni, Kubrick, Passolini, Teshigahara, Ozu, Kurosawa and the like, are long gone. Men who cared about what humanity is and what it is becoming. That especially is what I am interested in and is the sole concern of my filmmaking. Other people can make the entertaining stuff.

That would tie in with your DVD commentary, where you claim Atrocity is some kind of ‘nurturing’ film rather than a ‘junk food’ film.

‘Nurturing’ sounds like I made a granola bar into a film. Or that I’m some sort of wet nurse. At least the part about Atrocity not being the filmic equivalent of junk food is indeed correct. It’s not some empty crap that when consumed gives the illusion of fullness and satisfaction, if only for an instant. And then leaves you fat and sick.

I did not set out to make this or any other film as a stepping stone to a greater career in film, which was obviously my first, and perhaps my last, mistake. I’ve found that people in the film world, even the part of that world that pertains to my kind of films, really take you seriously only if they sense you are a ‘player’. They want to see where you are going. Lest you think I am kidding, Darren Aronofsky made PI around the same time I did Atrocity. It looked to me like a bad student film, but it was shrewdly marketed and now the guy is making Batman films.

That is the state of films today — it’s total sell-out land. So no, I don’t feel any kinships with people working today, not even people like Gaspar Noe, who I am sometimes compared with, because I am no fan of either gratuitous violence or doing anything in a film for the sake of effect or shock value.

Is it possible to change audience perception within a narrative-driven film industry? You must feel under siege from critics who see a non-narrative aesthetic as some kind of fault.

Go back a hundred years and look at the art world. How many artists were leaving traditional painting and representation for abstraction? What happened to them? Does that answer the question?

Not really — I’m not especially versed in the art world and its history.

My point is very simple: when abstraction arrived in the art world it was met with total derision, condemnation and refusal by the academy and the mainstream. Today, in a world where everyone is supposed to go to art museums, if only to catch the King Tut or Van Gogh megashow, we actually delude ourselves that we are culturally more astute than our forebearers, that a development like abstraction would immediately be greeted today with open arms, and/or that the avant garde has been subsumed into culture generally.

Cinema is the most comprehensive current art form, also the one uniquely of our time. Yet there is virtually no filmmaking being done that deserves the name of art. Film is entertainment, which is basically what art has become, as well. Abstraction, a bastard child of art which came to define modernism, is obviously kith and kin with the departure from narrative in film. And I can tell you from personal experience that you get the same reception making non-narrative films today as abstract painters or some poor bastard like Van Gogh got one hundred years ago.

Narrative film for me is pretty much dead. All the stories have been told, in their essence, to death. Every conceivable plot device has been done, every combination has been done, the only thing that changes is the time, place, etc. This is why there is a continuous progression towards ever greater violence and pornography in film (notice the ‘new’ movement in Asian cinema of ‘extreme’ violent film.) The elements of shock and titillation try to cover the banality and exhaustion of the form of what I call ‘filmed theatre’.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

Beyond the narrative horizon lies this incredible territory of possible films, but no one is brave enough to go there. If you do go, the people in the industry, morons that they are, don’t get it. Ordinary people do, however. But for the film industry, ordinary people are like subatomic particles for quantum physicists. As soon as they are placed under observation, their true nature becomes suspect, impossible to ever verify. All their research and focus groups suggest remaking Mission Impossible until the Rapture. Or for the independent crowd, assuring that every gay, lesbian, minority and special interest group receive their just due on screen, albeit using the same stories traditionally reserved for the mainstream.

Given the criticism you’ve faced, and the lack of exposure the film has received, do you feel the whole experience has been worthwhile?

I cannot say whether making the film was worthwhile. I made a worthwhile film, yes. It cost me dearly. It may never be seen by many people, and if it were up to some of the so-called Ballard ‘authorities’ like Mr Vaccari, it would not even be seen by Ballard fans, which would truly be a shame. I still hold out hope that a few people will somehow see the film and realise that it is possible to make a different kind of cinema and be inspired to make better films themselves. That would be enough for me.

What do you think JG Ballard’s greatest contribution to the 20th century is?

TBD.

Come on — let’s talk about Ballard. He deserves it. What do you appreciate about the great man?

I’ve basically spent my entire life trying to figure out why everything is so fucked up. Most people either don’t seem to know that this is the case, or pretend not to notice. When I discovered Ballard’s writing, it was obvious that he was one of those very few people who confront the world with astonishing honesty, insight and intelligence. The reason he is considered prophetic is simply his degree of awareness and his imaginative force. He sees around him, today, what others miss, understands the conflicting forces at work, and suggests probable or at least interesting outcomes that will occur in the future. It’s like watching balls go flying by. If you see the direction they are going, and their speed, you can predict fairly accurately when, where and what they will hit. Placing this process in the near future makes it appear prophetic.

Ballard is a new breed of philosopher, a far more interesting type, and maybe the only one to survive as the traditional ones are doomed to extinction. He is able to take very complex, subtle ideas and give them aesthetic form, give them import. This is so very rare.

The Atrocity Exhibition is your only feature film. Do you have plans to make more?

Given that Atrocity took all my energy and money for such a long time, and that the film world and the art world still don’t know what to do with the thing, I have been reconsidering making another film. As I have often said when people remark how wonderful it must be to be a film director — it’s a task I would not wish on my worst enemy.

…:: THE END

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POSTSCRIPT: Since this interview was first published, a couple of positive reviews of the film have appeared online, notably from influential British film magazine Sight & Sound, which renders Weiss’s claims that North American distribution solely rests on what this site has to say in a very different light. I haven’t included everything in the interview, but rereading our email trail today, I am still as shocked and bewildered as I was at the time. The clincher, as far as my decision to tell the story of this encounter open and honestly, was in Jonathan’s very last email, where he branded me ‘journalistically corrupt’ for editing the interview down from over 10,000 words, and for slightly rewording some of my original questions to him. I just couldn’t win. Not only did I do this after Jonathan pointed out that some of my questions unnecessarily referred to negative reviews, which I agreed with, but also because the nature of email interviews means you throw everything in, as you might not have a chance to ask follow-up questions — then you edit down later. The changes to my questions were minor and I stand by them — the originals exist for anyone who wants to see them. It’s not like I was hiding anything, either — the reason Jonathan knew about this was because I showed him the transcript before it went online. I was also accused of altering the tone of the interview with this rewording, which is why I have expanded the interview to include replies from Jonathan that were originally left out. The tone was already confrontational, right from the start.

Having said all that, I do wish Jonathan all the best for the future. I’m positive his film will find the audience it deserves. In the end, though, as far as he’s concerned, it probably doesn’t matter — a lot of people have taken quite an interest in this interview and have said to me that it’s made them even more determined to see the film. Some guy on a film forum even called it ‘superbly vitriolic’. So, ‘every cloud’, eh Jonathan?

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MORE INFO
+ Andrés Vaccari’s review of the DVD.
+ 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.

A hardcore fetish site called Goregasm linked to our ‘JG Ballard: Live in London‘ article. Upon following the link back, I discovered a corner of the web that was fairly ‘out there’ to say the least. I’ll leave you to judge their intentions from their site title, but I will tell you that they worship our friend Ballard as ‘Supreme Crash Lord J.G. Ballard’.

Anyway, through Goregasm I came across the CrashBonsai site. I know this link was bandied about the net a couple of years back but it’s worth another look.

According to Goregasm

“To Crashman’s great satisfaction, the serious psychiatric disorder known as Crash Obsession is spreading rapidly worldwide. Not only do we have the great book and unforgettable movie CRASH (“beyond the bounds of depravity”) from Supreme Crash Lord JG Ballard and David Cronenberg, some people are even getting into Bonsai Crashing, the ancient Oriental art of crashing model cars into little tiny trees. And you thought the Crashman was weird, huh? If this idea branches out to include small planes, there’s a definite market opportunity here. Hmmmm…”

By the way, CrashBonsai is not hardcore or porn (although it probably is fetishistic) and so I can recommend the site as good, clean family fun. I’m off to purchase one of these quite clearly Ballardian mini-sculptures, and maybe I can persuade this guy to produce versions of the pranged 1961 Lincoln Continental and Porsche Spyder that are so dear to the heart of all true Ballard/Cronenberg fans.

From the CrashBonsai blurb:

“CrashBonsai is the creation of John Rooney, an artist who is torn between the desire to create and destroy. Recently, he has been making bonsai plants, and combining them with model cars and trucks which he has creatively smashed and melted, to create “CrashBonsai,” little living car crash sculptures.

You’ll find a variety of vehicles in crashed cars, their scales and dimensions listed. Each model is unique, and individually disassembled, cut, melted, filed, smashed, then reassembled to replicate a real fender bender. Some models might work perfectly with a bonsai you already have, but generally you should expect to create a new bonsai around the vehicles, often placing the tree more to the side of a pot to make room for the vehicle. No passengers have been injured in CrashBonsai accidents, although some drivers have reported a brief, even euphoric loss of consciousness.”

Saturday February 11, 2006
The Guardian

Ambit 182 Autumn 2005 (£6.50. UK subscriptions £25. www.ambitmagazine.co.uk)

“Edward Paolozzi, the pop artist who died a few months ago, was a contributor to Ambit for many years. In discussions for what would turn out to be his last illustrations for the magazine, founding editor Martin Bax recalls suggesting that they use an image from a previous issue. “NO Martin,” Paolozzi apparently retorted, “you can do that when I am dead in a retrospective”. This, sadly, is that retrospective. And it’s a feast of Paolozzi’s playful photomontages, kinetic pen and ink
drawings of clockwork ducks and collages of jiving top-hatted sadomasochists. Established in 1959, and with JG Ballard and Carol Ann Duffy among its alumni, Ambit, unvaryingly elegantly designed, publishes a striking combination of poetry, prose and pictures. Paolozzi’s association with Ambit began in 1967, and a hint of 60s radicalism persists to this day – detrimentally so on occasions. A tired fascination with sex rears its head here and there. Dai Vaughan’s crushingly unerotic imagining of women pleasuring themselves with their own hosiery, in his words, “fingering their lips pink-fringed as clams”, is an especially low moment and one unworthy of the periodical as a whole. A tale by HP Tinker, on the other hand, fizzes with the
kind of zany, surreal conjunctions that recall Barthelme and Pynchon in their prime.”

More at: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/roundupstory/0,,1706966,00.html

“Exactly when the term medical fetish became popular among the BDSM community is hard to determine. However, it is a widely used phrase that has been touched on by authors like J.G. Ballard, romance novelists in the romantic doctor/patient role-play scenario, filmmakers like David Cronenberg, and photographers like Romain Slocombe.

Yet, even among these diverse artists and perhaps not unlike medicine itself, there is an obvious and expansive divide among their specialized medically themed works. Slocombe appears like an ER specialist or ambulance worker as he makes a fetish art out of bandages in his ‘Broken Dolls’ series. In Deviant Desires, Katharine Gates describes his bandages as a medical version of Japanese erotic rope bondage.

Cronenberg is said to describe himself as a ‘Beverly Hills gynaecologist’ and you can see how this arises in many of his films from his use of speculums and references in Dead Ringers (1988) and to the vaginal-looking organic game in eXistenz (1999). Ballard, who is the author of the notorious novel, Crash (1973), which was, not surprisingly, turned into a film by Cronenberg in 1996, is a medical student, and his specialty seems to be forensic psychology and science. “When he is shown some kind of techno-social-medical innovation, he’s always trying to peel it back and understand it from the unconscious urgings that power it.”

All of these artists are avant-garde and just like anything that’s avant-garde or taboo, it eventually moves into the popular imagination. Through these artists, we can certainly see how fetishism plays a role and particularly how medical fetishism may have appeared more prevalently in popular and porn culture since the early seventies.”

Bruce Sterling is a prolific science-fiction writer, futurist, social critic and design professor, best known for his bestselling novels and seminal short fiction, and as the editor of the Mirrorshades anthology that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre. His nonfiction includes works of futurism such as Tomorrow Now; a regular column and blog for Wired; and his Viridian Design listserv that presciently riffs on climate-change issues and Green design. He’s also wrapping up a one-year tenure as Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In his hometown of Austin, Texas, Sterling sat down in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, after a day spent visiting the local evacuee center, to talk about the continued importance of JG Ballard in an increasingly apocalyptic world.

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Chris Nakashima-Brown writes short fiction and criticism in Austin, Texas. See www.nakashima-brown.net for more.
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So, have you read any Ballard lately?

I read Super-Cannes and the User’s Guide to the Millennium essays. And I come across his critical work with some regularity – newspapers columns, interviews and so forth.

Yeah, he’s kind of a regular in all of the English newspapers.

He is. He’s doing a lot of occasional journalism these days. It’s surprising how often I’ll be reading something and just think to myself “Gosh, this is so lucid and stimulating and – wait a minute, this is Ballard!”

You wrote in the introduction to Mirrorshades that Ballard had a key role in cyberpunk.

I think I may have name-checked him in the introduction to that book, but that wasn’t the half of it. Ballard was the first science-fiction writer I ever read who really blew my mind. I was reading a lot of basic Andre Norton ‘space-squid’ nonsense at the time – I must have been 13 or 14 – then I read The Crystal World. And the assumptions behind The Crystal World were so radically different and ontologically disturbing compared to common pulp-derived SF. If you just look at the mechanisms of the suspension of disbelief in The Crystal World, it’s like, okay, time is vibrating on itself and this has caused the growth of a leprous crystal…whatever. There’s never any kind of fooforah about how the scientist in his lab is going to understand this phenomenon, and reverse it, and save humanity. It’s not even a question of anybody needing to understand what’s going on in any kind of instrumental way. On the contrary, the whole structure of the thing is just this kind of ecstatic surreal acceptance. All Ballard disaster novels are vehicles of psychic fulfilment. But at the age of 14 I couldn’t begin to think in terminology like that. All I knew was that there was something going on in this book that was radically different from the sensibility of everything else I had seen.

They’re narrative laboratories, right? They’re constructed to explore the subconsciousness of the humans that inhabit them rather than getting at it the other way around.

Sort of. Ballard’s a medical student. And he’s also a guy who’s really good at pastiching things that he finds in the wastebasket: the sterile language of the Warren Commission or crash-injury textbooks. He’s really good at repurposing found material. It’s like Mark Pauline – you ask him, “Gee, Mark, how do you make your machines so monstrous?” Pauline says, “I try to get close to them and understand what it is they’re really trying to do”. Right? So it doesn’t surprise me that Pauline is a big Ballard fan, because Ballard has a very similar approach. If you show him some kind of techno-social-medical innovation, he’s always trying to peel it back and understand it from the unconscious urgings that power it.

So how do you position him as an influence on you and the other seminal cyberpunks? Would cyberpunk have happened without him?

Well, I’m sure cyberpunk would have happened without him because cyberpunk is just science fiction by another name. It’s just another attempt, another wave of technical development, and another wave of literateurs trying to jump the gap between the two cultures. Trying to literarily repurpose the computer revolution. And Ballard is someone who’s really good at repurposing scientific material to literary purposes without ever speaking that kind of spavined pop science-ese. The kind of lame language that says something like [holds up digital camera]: “You know, if you could see the tiny grooves that have been carved on the chip of this digital camera, why they would stretch to the moon and back three-and-a-half times!” Which is an attempt to invest wonder in a dry, industrial process. It’s the Carl Sagan school of trying to pump mystic scientism into the dryness of physics. There’s just something phoney-baloney about it because it’s taking an intellectual process that’s very much about methodically stripping the mystery out of natural phenomena and then trying to re-mystify it by approaching it from some more “friendly” sensibility. And there’s just something bogus about that. It has the bogusness of an adult telling a pre-pubertal child about the birds and the bees without talking about the burning needs of sexuality.

That’s what a lot of pop science writing is like. It talks down to the reader, and it covers the stark majesty of Euclidean insight with redigested pap. You don’t get that kind of talking down from Ballard. He’s someone who really seems at ease in the science world, basically because he was writing for science magazines in the early years of bitter struggle. He knew how to get the stuff, translate it down, and pass it out to the readers of technical mags. So he’s not buffaloed by the material. He doesn’t go in for mystic scientism. He doesn’t dress things up in any kind of literary majesty or outrageous metaphors or phoney-baloney sideshows, style, extended similes.

Is he a science-fiction writer?

Oh, yeah. In some sense he’s the only science-fiction writer. He’s a figure who ranks with Stanislaw Lem in that regard, I think. He’s just repurposed the tools of the genre to such a tremendous extent that he’s doing things that are unheard of. He’s like a Hendrix figure who’s, like, this guy that picks up a guitar and instead of doing the things you expect to hear from a guitar, there are notes coming out of it that are like flutes and saxophones. That’s the kind of creative idiosyncrasy that Ballard brings to the genre.

But he’s not extrapolating anything. He’s not a futurist, is he?

Well, he is a futurist, and he’s always extrapolating something or other, but he’s usually extrapolating dark motivations.

More social science than physical science?

No, I don’t think it’s even social science. I mean, a book like Crash is like a guy who’s studied hardcore porn, like bondage porn. The kind of porn where people are so trussed up in like ropes and bags that it’s weirdly asexual, like latex porn, or one of these really extreme levels of fetishism that are close to mental breakdown. And he’s thought: why doesn’t someone do this with cars? That’s an extrapolation. It’s like saying, okay, given A and given C, given latex porn, what about people who have sex with car collisions? And in point of fact, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why people couldn’t get obsessed with car collisions. On the face of it it’s like saying, given a car, why not a flying car – which is a very standard sci-fi extrapolation.

Ballard is one of the few people who would extrapolate that kind of interiority in the human psyche – to say, okay, given bondage porn, why not cars colliding? Take his story “Manhole 69″ – it’s about an experiment that renders people sleepless, and they end up with attacks of claustrophobia. They’re sort of liberated and they don’t sleep, and at the end they succumb to a massive mental breakdown where they feel like their psyches have been crushed in a box. And that’s an extrapolation, but it’s an extrapolation along the lines of madness. It involves someone thinking about the human reaction to technical innovation in a way which is not cut and dried. It’s not design thinking, it’s not science thinking, it’s not technical thinking, it’s not medical thinking – it’s really surreal thinking.

Is it the reaction to technical developments that makes it science fiction, or is it the surreal element?

Well I don’t know what else you would call it besides science fiction, because it posits a breakthrough. It’s got cognitive estrangement. It’s got an arc of idea development. In some sense it’s a reasonable extrapolation, but it’s also just very horrifying, and you don’t see many science-fiction writers who are willing to push that line of development – the flaws in the human psyche and what might happen under such circumstances.

You mention Lem. Are there other writers within the genre that you think come at science fiction from a similar angle?

Well, the British New Wave writers. Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head – that’s a pretty Ballardian work. But Aldiss is very prolific and he can sort of do anything for anybody, whereas Ballard does stick to his last.

A lot of his work has an apocalyptic setting, similar to more contemporary climate-catastrophe works from people like Kim Stanley Robinson; some of your mid-90s work has that going on. Ballard comes at it from a very different angle, like he’s one of these cosy English catastrophe-school writers, but with a perverse enjoyment of the liberating aspects of the disaster.

Well, I think it’s Ballard’s youthful acceptance of life in a prison camp that allows him to cheerfully look at the major breakdowns of the bourgeois world and accept them. Lem is very much the same way. I remember Lem saying something along the lines that the Nazi concentration camps had conclusively destroyed the ability of literature to be written about the individual – that from now on you could only write serious work with the scope of the annihilation of a whole population. It simply made no sense to write to any scale less grand than a response to genocide. Lem has the experience of somebody who has witnessed the unspeakable. It’s like going out one day and finding your capital city reduced to ruins by Stuka bombers – that gives him a grandeur of the imagination.

< < Italo Calvino

Do you suppose the next Ballard or Lem is going to come out of the Ninth Ward?

Well, I’m not sure if we saw the next Ballard or Lem we’d be able to recognise them as such. We’d just say, well, okay, he’s William Vollman, or whoever. He’d be as sui generis as these other two characters. You know, another guy who I think is oddly in Ballard’s camp in some profound way is Calvino.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Calvino is similar because his work is very extrapolative in a lot of ways, an Oulipo-style mathematical game playing. A Calvino story will posit something unusual, and then it’s chewed over from a whole mathematical-philosophical perspective. And there’s a great deal of mental fireworks in it, but it’s not the sort of thing that makes your Analog engineer-reader slap his forehead with a sense of fulfilment: “Oh, that’s my kind of story”. No, afraid not.

Some of your work has some really overt Ballardian influences, like “The Beautiful and the Sublime,” where you have these people hanging out at this kind of Alpine Vermilion Sands, and you have grounded astronauts and people flying gliders and they’re all very bourgeois and it’s got this English parlour thing going on – it’s a beautiful story, like the kinder and gentler aspects of Ballard. Are you cognisant of those similarities?

I internalised the guy’s work at an early age but I never wanted to write a Ballard pastiche, any more than I would have wanted to write an Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche. There have been moments in stories where I’ve written a phrase and thought, “Well, that’s very Jimmy Ballard”. But I wouldn’t dare write a Ballard story. I just wouldn’t do it.

Do you perceive that he had a similar influence on some of the other seminal cyberpunks like Gibson or Neal Stephenson?

Lew Shiner talked a lot about Ballard – he was a Ballard fan. Gibson is certainly a Ballard reader. A lot of cyberpunks were major Anglophiles. We’re really kind of New Wave 2.0, and if you were into New Wave, you really had to be into British New Wave because that was where it was happening. Of course, I’m a Harlan Ellison disciple, so I’m American New Wave by right of inheritance. But, yeah, you had to read Ballard. I know for a fact that John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly and a lot of the other humanist writers were jealously anxious of Ballard. They didn’t appreciate the idea that cyberpunks were somehow appropriating this guy – someone they really thought of as a hero of their own – as somebody who was willing to write real literary fiction about scientific things, without doing these annoying cyberpunk tropes like “my deck’s got more RAM than yours”.

How do you think it is that Ballard transcended the genre in terms of critical acceptance?

Well, mostly because he really knows what he’s talking about. Ballard can write a movie review that I would dare any other science-fiction writer to do. Science-fiction writers can’t write about popular culture, even high culture, without trotting out their own self-importance. Which is sort of humiliating. Ballard never does that. He’s said things that are very affirmative about science fiction, like “it’s the only true literature of the twentieth century,” “Earth is the only alien planet,” and other wise things. Ballard’s the kind of guy – the kind of science-fiction writer – who can put on a performance in a pop art gallery that would cause a riot! If you took most science-fiction writers and dropped them in a pop-art gallery, they’d be saying things like “I didn’t get it about Picasso”, or “I kind of like Bridget Riley op art. Is that her real name, Bridget Riley?” They wouldn’t grab the bit between their teeth and push the world of artistic expression to a place that caused people to freak out.

There’s a disconnect between the science-fiction community and the rest of popular culture.

Well, science fiction’s a form of popular culture. But if you’d look at most science-fiction practitioners, they basically come across like a Nashville hat act. They’re hicks.

William Gibson wrote an introduction last year to Eileen Gunn’s short story collection, Stable Strategies, in which he recalled his younger self yearning for SF as Bohemia. Ballard seems like he really pulls that off in the context of London in the swinging Sixties. He takes the genre more into the same territory as abstract painters or pop-art practitioners.

I think that’s right. And of course he’s a real scholar of the surrealist movement – he really gets it about André Breton and Max Ernst and the other surrealists. Take early Ballard books like Crystal World with its Ernst frottage cover – that wasn’t by accident. He just has better taste than most science-fiction writers. He’s better read than most science-fiction writers. He takes a coherent intellectual interest in things that aren’t science or technology or engineering. He’s cognisant of those things because he’s got a more variegated tool set. He’s better read. He’s a widely travelled guy. He’s a child of the diaspora. He grew up in China, mostly. He’s not a Little England kind of guy. There’s nothing parochial about him. He never succumbs to nationalist cant. He’s not religious. He just has imagination on the cosmic scale. He’s a hard guy to surprise.

Ballard wrote in the French introduction to Crash that “science fiction is the only true literature of the twentieth century”. Is that still relevant in the 21st century?

I’m not sure that that’s going to hold any water. But I would bet that, in the 22nd century, if someone read that, then Ballard, and if they themselves were of a Ballardian frame of mind, then they would certainly agree with him. Unfortunately, they would also think that if science fiction was the only true form of literature in the twentieth century, it’s only genuine practitioner was JG Ballard. Which may in fact be the case. The judgment of history is still out, but my suspicion is that he has a better chance of being read in a hundred years than ninety percent of his colleagues.

What about Burroughs? Ballard seems to talk about Burroughs a lot. Do you think he can be situated in the same territory roughly?

No. I think Ballard is actually about ten times smarter than Burroughs. I mean, Burroughs is like a drunk who found a sharpened screwdriver in the gutter. His work is claptrap, but it’s marvellous claptrap. So that gives it a weird demented Bohemian majesty. Whereas Ballard is a very fastidious kind of guy who’s very much on top of his game. He’s willing to stare into the same abyss as Burroughs, but he’d never sit there in a heroin stupor as the abyss started eating its way up his leg. You look at the colleagues of Burroughs and you just tick off the body count. It’s unbelievable. Whereas the colleagues of Ballard did pretty well for themselves. Burroughs may be a greater artist than Ballard, because he’s really pushing right past, and over, the edge. But I think Ballard as a creative figure is much more on top of his game than Burroughs. His muse is not a carnivore. He doesn’t have a monkey on his back. He’s really in command of his material.

Over the course of his career we’ve seen this retreat from conventional science-fictional settings and situations, at least in the novels, where we start out with the post-apocalyptic scenarios of the early novels, and then we go to the 70s novels – the urban laboratories of Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise – and on to the contemporary novels, set in a very contemporary setting with very apparently conventional protagonists: Super-Cannes, Cocaine Nights, and Millennium People, where we have middle-class revolutionaries in Chelsea. Any thoughts on what drives that kind of progression?

Well, probably living in Shepperton…

I see similar trends with the cyberpunks: you and William Gibson and Neal Stephenson all write books that have a more contemporary setting. Your most recent novel, The Zenith Angle, is a kind of contemporary, cyberpunky techno thriller; Gibson’s last book, Pattern Recognition, is a post-9/11 quasi-thriller about a cool hunter…

I don’t know. You get good at something and you want to refine it. I think young men have a lot of trouble just keeping the muse down to a hard, steady glow. You tend to see an awful lot of fireworks when you’re a young science-fiction writer, and you tend to use a lot of found material, which I think Ballard did. You look at Ballard, you find a truly deracinated guy in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in the Air Force with nothing to do with himself, suddenly discovering American pulp magazines and thinking, “Jesus, I had no idea this stuff even existed”. So he finds his toolkit at hand and he repurposes all of it. That was certainly the case in the first three books I wrote. They’re all stock material and I’m just trying to bring them up to date, file off the serial numbers, and adjust them to my own sensibility.

Do you perceive a lingering influence of Ballard and the other British New Wave writers in the new British SF?

< < China Mieville

You know, I’d like to say that I did, but I don’t know. There is a kind of edginess to, say, China Mieville – this kind of really “go for the Grand Guignol” thing, something you don’t see American fantasy writing do very much. British SF and fantasy generally just has a broader emotional palette than American fantasy. But the new British space opera, or even British New Weird, doesn’t feel particularly Ballardian to me. They really feel like the Beatles repurposing Chuck Berry or Little Richard. I mean, these are guys who were reading mostly American cultural product and recognising that the Americans had fallen mute in some terrible way and this is their chance to really step out onto the stage and play the pipe organ.

Who’s the real standard bearer in American sci fi these days, other than people who are just writing rack product?

I would guess it would be something like Small Beer Press or maybe McSweeney’s – if you want to read something that will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, that would be where you would go. I mean, that really has a very British feel to it. McSweeney’s feels British to me – you read it and it’s all these arch little overeducated statements by guys who are making sort of dry, semi-British kinds of…I don’t know, it’s weird.

Ballard’s early novels were centred on environmental disasters: the environmental devastation is used as the excuse for the creation of a surreal landscape with its own strange logic. Do you see a new awareness of these issues of environmental disaster in the genre? Do you think that science fiction has a role to play in that debate?

I guess. There’s The Drought, The Wind From Nowhere, Crystal World, The Drowned World – his apprentice works. Those works, to me, don’t show any serious environmental awareness; The Wind From Nowhere is literally a wind from nowhere, which makes no sense on the face of it. It’s not like it’s a work of meteorological extrapolation. This isn’t Kim Stanley Robinson manfully tackling climate change. It’s really a guy who saw his world comprehensively destroyed as a young man trying to come to terms with what he himself went through, I think. They’re classic period pieces. The subtext of all those works is British imperial decline. If the question is whether we’re going to be seeing more works of imperial decline, then yeah, I’d be forecasting a few of those, actually. That wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

Do you see any early tremors of that out there?

I don’t know. My suspicion is that in another four to five years you’re going to find people writing about climate change in the same way they wrote about the nuclear threat in the 50s. It’s just going to be in every story every time. People are going to come up with a set of climate-change tropes, like three-eyed mutants and giant two-headed whatevers, because this is the threat of our epoch and it just becomes blatantly obvious to everybody. Everybody’s going to pile on to the bandwagon and probably reduce the whole concept to kindling. That may be the actual solution to a genuine threat of Armageddon – to talk about it so much that it becomes banal.

To me these late-Ballard pieces, these Shepperton pieces – Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and so forth – really seem like gentle chiding from somebody who’s recognised that his civilisation really has gone mad. They’re a series of repetitions that say, “Look, we’re heading for a world where consensus reality really is just plain unsustainable, and the ideas that the majority of our people hold in their heart of hearts are just not connected to reality”. I think that may be a very prophetic assessment on his part. I think we may in fact be in such a world right now – where people have really just lost touch with the “reality-based community” and are basically just living in self-generated fantasy echo chambers that have no more to do with the nature of geopolitical reality than Athanasius Kircher or Castaneda’s Don Juan.

Any reasons for optimism?

Well, yeah. I think it’s an optimistic thing that Ballard’s lived a long time. He’s sort of a great, spreading oak tree, really. If you had looked at the wild boys of the British New Wave in their heyday, you might’ve thought, “Oh, well, they’ll all hang themselves,” or “They’ll throw themselves into the sea like beatniks,” or “This will end in murder”. And if anybody was going to come to a wicked end, it would have been Jimmy Ballard – the obsessive, the psychotic crank, the man who’s staring right into the eyes of it. His condensed novels [collected in The Atrocity Exhibition] really have a freak-out quality to them. But he didn’t die of that. On the contrary, he just sort of fed on it. You can read his critical works now and he’s obviously in full possession of his senses. He’s funny, he’s on top of his game. He’s still an interesting guy to read even though he’s at an advanced age now. He’s got things to say that are remarkable and make you feel better about things and really demonstrate some analytical insight. I envy that. I hope that if I live that long I have that many marbles left in my little velvet drawstring bag. To me that’s reason for optimism. I don’t like to call it optimism, because as a futurist I think there’s something wrong with that term. If you say you’re optimistic or pessimistic about the future, it’s just giving you an excuse to place a patch over one eye and ignore half of the determining factors. You should struggle hard not to be optimistic or pessimistic about a future prospect. What you should do is be engaged and in command of the facts. So to be optimistic or pessimistic are really intellectual vices. But on the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with a role model.

Ballard is somebody who really has something to say. He’s saying it to a lot of different people. He’s never sold out, never wrote a cheesy trilogy. He had movies made of his books. He recovered. He didn’t care. They were okay movies, even. He had some money. His children grew to adulthood. He has grandchildren. He was never arrested. He hasn’t been in a jail or a clinic. He’s not Jeffrey Archer. He didn’t come to a bad end. He’s not an alcoholic. He has a life that many people would envy. And justly so. To that end, I feel very pleased about him. Not that I am an optimist about him or his worldview. I would not want him to have another worldview. I’m not going to criticise his sensibility. He’s a great artist. He’s given something very few people can give; in his case, he’s the only one who could possibly have given that. He gave a lot of it, it was good, it was consistently interesting. What more does one want?

..::: LINKS
>> Beyond the Beyond (Bruce Sterling’s blog)
>> Viridian Design
>> Art Center College of Design
>> Survival Research Labs/Mark Pauline
>> McSweeney’s

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

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

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

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

Now, finally, the truth can be told…”

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

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

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

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

FORCE VS DISPLACEMENT THEMES! rhapsodised the airport daily headlines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following is an excerpt from an official report prepared by Andrés Vaccari, on behalf of the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra.

DISCLAIMER: The following photos have been modified by the patients referenced by this report. The JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra implies no endorsement of any kind whatsoever by their publication.

The Conspiracy of Grey Men

“The Grey Men,” Dr Travis explained, “play a pivotal role in these kinds of fantasies. The appearance of this archetype is contemporary with the dawn of large bureaucracies and the rise of pseudo-rational economic ideologies. The Grey Men share the ideal traits of bureaucrats, accountants, lawyers, businessmen and other exemplars of the human fauna spawned by industrial capitalism. They are emblems of efficiency and procedure, to whom people are abstract quantities, and society a series of equations of greed and demand. Their code words are ‘inevitability’, ‘invisibility’ and ‘profit’. Their language is a mixture of esoteric jargon and mathematical ephemera, with constant references to quasi-alchemical concepts like ‘The Invisible Hand’, the ‘Balance of Trade’ and ‘The Trickle-Down Effect’. It is not surprising, therefore, that we are witnessing a marked increase in these paranoid fantasies after the Liberal Party’s rise to power in 1996. It is not a coincidence either that patients are becoming fixated sexually on the figure of John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister – the living embodiment of Grey Man.”

The Mechanics of Inhumanity

During one of the studies, a series of photographs was presented to a group of schizophrenic patients, who were instructed to group them in a meaningful schema. This series included: 1) a diagram of a Watt steam engine; 2) Liberal Party figureheads; 3) the disfigured genitalia of anonymous car crash victims; 4) well-known environmental disasters; 5) Jeanette Howard, the Prime Ministers’ wife, eating at a corporate dinner; 6) queues at banks and Centrelink offices; 7) victims of police brutality; Victorian ex-Premier Jeff Kennett’s hairstyle; 9) Iraqi refugees at Port Hedland Detention Centre.

Sixty-five per cent of patients strongly associated the disfigured genitalia with various powerful figures in the Howard Government, a phenomenon doctors interpreted as expressing powerlessness – projected as psycho-sexual impairment – before a divisive and hermetic political regime. The Liberal Party figures were the objects of mutilation scenarios, and often the photos themselves were torn or cut. Also, forty-nine per cent of patients reported various elaborate, Sadean erotic fantasies. In these, they took submissive roles, often involving binding and genital disfigurement.

The Sleep of Reason

Dr Travis explained that the advent of discourses like “Scientific Management”, “Human Resource Management” and “Economic Rationalisation” had introduced a novel figure into the pantheon of modern psychosis. These prophets of efficiency and mechanism had become insistent iconic presences in the cosmologies of the deranged. Dr Travis said that the new millenium would bring nightmarish variations on these archetypes. He cited a recent US study, where patients in various states of terminal psychosis described terrifying meetings with cold female inquisitors, who would read out long strings of numbers, soliciting detailed information such as physical characteristics and financial assets.

These visitors, clad in neat, spotless grey suits, dictated intricate megalomanical theories that explained society through the workings of a cryptic “Economic Realm”, which they described as a land of milk and honey where the souls of workers and managers travelled after death, and which was ruled by a benevolent, all-seeing entity.

Assassination Fantasies

During one of the studies, long-term inmates were provided with Conceptual Assassination Kits, and the ensuing fantasy-elaboration process was monitored closely.

In 87 per cent of cases, the figure of Prime Minister John Howard emerged as a favourite target of assassination. Elaborate death schemes were put forth, many of which involved multiple automobile disasters and byzantine torture machinery. Twenty-one per cent of patients singled out Minister for the Environment Robert Hill as a preferred object of death, with the proposed methods of execution clearly echoing the present global devastation: death by toxic waste poisoning, melanoma and famine.

Psychotherapists concluded that the Prime Minister’s lack of any vital human traits – such as compassion, imagination or sexuality – made him a favourite vessel for various paranoid projections and erotic decontextualisations. In a minority of cases, this perceived emptiness facilitated reconceptualisation of Howard as a robot or a computer-generated image.

John Howard’s Conceptual Pudenda

Shortly before his unexplained disappearance, Dr Travis outlined the results of his research in a manuscript presently in the possession of a Federal Police Task Force.

” The crew of a fishing boat blocked emergency radio frequencies for hours as they watched an erotic film. The crew of the Blyth-based Oceania accidentally left their radio switched to the emergency channel on Thursday as they were off the North East coast. They then settled down to watch the film Crash on a TV which was next to the radio – not realising it was being broadcast over a 30-mile radius.

A lifeboat from Berwick was dispatched to alert the crew to their mistake. Frantic coastguards contacted Channel Four to broadcast an urgent message during the film. But the lifeboat crew from Berwick managed to reach the vessel before the message was broadcast.

Humber Coastguard said it was lucky the incident happened during a quiet period and at night. A spokesman also said it was fortunate that sea conditions were relatively calm. He said: “This should serve as a warning to others to be careful with their emergency radio switches.”

The skipper of the Oceania, George Mair, said he had apologised for the error. He said he had inadvertently jammed a clock radio into the switch that opened the emergency radio channel. He said although the film was on in the background, he was busy working on the boat at the time.

The controversial film Crash, starring Holly Hunter and James Spader, tells the story of people who gain sexual gratification from car crashes.”

Q: When Crash came out, a lot of people took it literally and thought it was stupid — how can you get turned on by a car crash? — instead of thinking of it as a metaphor. I mean, it wasn’t really about cars.

A: Crash, both the book and the movie, are fairly special artworks that require a non-literal approach. [Author] J.G. Ballard invented this weird subculture to discuss the nature of subcultures — people who get into weird activities and frames of mind because they are unable to derive satisfaction from the standard forms of behavior, including sexuality. So yes, you’re right, it wasn’t about cars. Although I could make the case — just for fun — that there are people like that, that there are some subcultures that exist where people crash cars for excitement.

Q: No, there isn’t!

A: [smiles] Well . . . OK, yes, we invented it.

What happens when you get an actor who says no to a piece of direction?
I’ve never had that.
There was a problem, wasn’t there, with Elias Koteas doing a gay scene in Crash?
Yeah. But he did it.
What happened there?
I don’t yell and scream. It’s just not my style. It’s always a seduction, always Machiavellian. The one thing I never do is yell. Except once. That was at James Woods [in Videodrome (1983)]. I said, “Will you just stop fucking around and just get out there and say the fucking lines!” You have to understand, though, that Woods is a very smart man, but he got to the point where he was exasperating, and he knew what I was saying when I said it. But with Elias it was odd. It wasn’t homophobia so much as a comment [James] Spader made triggered some cultural aversion to being perceived in a certain way. I think he was testing me to see if he could get out of it. I made him understand that the whole movie was blown if he didn’t do that scene.

The interview also reveals Cronenberg’s likely next project, Martin Amis’ London Fields, and a promising new attitude to critics -
“I’m not actually a violent person but I had to learn to kill with my bare hands to make this movie [A History of Violence ]. So I could now kill a critic, any critic, in seconds. It’d be so fast people wouldn’t know why he dropped to the ground. And I’m tempted to sometimes.”