Illustration by John Coulthart.

WINNER
Ben Slater; ‘Vista 8′

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

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

MORE ENTRIES BELOW…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shahin Afrassiabi; ‘Home’

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

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

Mike Bonsall; ‘Day of Creation’

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

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

Julian Gough; ‘Flesh Frame’

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

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

Russell Miller; ‘A Journey Through A Distant Land’

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

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

Jack Strain; ‘Ballardian’

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

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

Supervert; ‘Superego’

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

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

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ J.G. Ballard Pastiche Competition

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

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

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

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

All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of their occupants.

——————————————————
J.G. Ballard. High-Rise (1975).
——————————————————

At some stage, I hope to post something on the work of Robert Calvert, who wrote lyrics and sang for Hawkwind on and off from the early to late 70s. Calvert was rubbing shoulders with Michael Moorcock, and his lyrics and poetry reveal a strong influence from both Moorcock and Ballard.

For now, here are Calvert’s lyrics for the Hawkwind track ‘High-Rise’, from the PXR5 album (1979), based mostly on Ballard’s High-Rise, but with a bit of help from the JGB story ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962) as well:

Flat block
Of two dimensions
Neon totem pole to the sky
Keeping scores of people stacked up so high
Above the ground
But all they can hear is the sound
Of the wind in the antennae
It’s a human zoo
A suicide machine

High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
All stacked up in a high rise block

Childhood
Of concrete cube shaped
A flypaper stuck with human life
Caged up rage
Swarming all the time
Tear out the telephones
Rip up the pages of directories
And wreck all these
High speed lifts and elevators
Be a sabotage rebel without a cause

High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
All stacked up in a high rise block

Starfish
Of human blood shape
Tentacles of human gore
Spread out on the pavement from the 99th floor
Well somebody said that he jumped
But we know he was pushed
He was just like you might have been
On the 99th floor of a suicide machine

High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
All stacked up in a high rise block”

——————————————————————————————————
‘High-Rise’ (lyrics by Robert Calvert; music by Simon House).
——————————————————————————————————

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

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.

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Distressed B29, Tinian, © Dan Norton 2006

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.

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

Chris Marker. La Jetée.

review by Simon Sellars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Simon Sellars

"CHICAGO — Bond was denied Friday for a 23-year-old woman accused of intentionally ramming her car into another vehicle at a Skokie intersection in a suicide attempt, killing three men from Chicago and injuring three others. Jeanette Sliwinski was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated battery in connection with the Thursday afternoon crash at Niles Center Road and Dempster Street, according to a news release from Skokie police.

Sliwinski, of 8915 S. Parkside St. in Morton Grove, was denied bond when a  hearing was held in the Skokie Courthouse in her absence, while she remains
hospitalized from the crash, Cook County state’s attorney’s office spokesman Tom Stanton said. Stanton did not know which judge presided over the hearing.

Sliwinski was accused of intentionally ramming her 2000 red Ford Mustang into a 2001 Honda Civic, which was stopped at a red light, because she was
distraught and trying to kill herself, Stanton said. He said her car was travelling more than 70 mph before the impact. Three men in the Civic were killed. They were identified as Michael Dahlquist, 39, John Glick, 35, and Douglas Meis, 29, all of Chicago, according to release.

Stanton said Sliwinski was not seriously injured."

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

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

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

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

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

– William Burroughs, preface to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970