‘Like the suspended state of duty-free malls, a zone at once inside and yet outside the legal parameters of the country it exists in, Vaughan and [Crash's narrator] Ballard experience the motorways as weirdly detached from an embedded culture or history or morality’.

Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard.

From today’s news:

‘Japanese tourist Hiroshi Nohara is on a layover at the Mexico City airport. It has lasted almost three months, and he has no plans to leave…

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” he said through a visiting interpreter originally hired by a television station. “I don’t have a reason.”

The embassy can’t force him to leave, and since Nohara’s visa is valid all Mexican officials can do is wait for it to expire in early March. For reasons he can’t explain, Nohara has been in Terminal 1 of the Benito Juarez International Airport since September 2, surviving off donations from fast food restaurants and passengers and sleeping in a chair.’

Yes, I know precisely how he feels.

+ 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.

‘You call this a nation?’ Approaching Sealand (photo: Simon Sellars).

While we’re on the subject of interstitial architecture, the concept of micronations could be said to be an example, especially when old, forgotten and disused structures slip through the cracks of nationalism. Sealand, a WWII gun platform in the North Sea, is perhaps the most (in)famous micronation and I had the unsettling experience of visiting it in May this year.

I wrote a travel piece on my journey for the Australian newspaper a few weeks back and that’s now appeared online. My photos weren’t used, so I’ve reproduced a couple below.

I’ve been developing a Ballardian perspective on micronations for some time now, delivering a paper at the Ballard conference in East Anglia earlier this year that made tentative steps towards exploring the connection. The paper was directly inspired by the answers I gave to Geoff Manaugh when he interviewed me over at BLDGBLOG last year, a conversation discussing the 2006 Lonely Planet micronations book I was involved in. Geoff’s last question to me was ‘How does this work intersect with your interest in J.G. Ballard?’, and that’s what kicked it all off, really.

I’ve refrained from posting too much on Ballardian.com about this area of interest, as I’m waiting to find out if my paper is being accepted for print publication. Once I know either way, I’ll be able to: post the paper here if not, or drum up a different version if yes.

Me on board Sealand (photo: Simon Sellars).

Sealand crew (photo: Simon Sellars).

..:: MORE INFO
+ Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations
+ Geoff’s BLDGBLOG interview with me
+ My travel piece, ‘Sealand: On the Heap’, published in the Australian newspaper, and reproduced online

‘Tourism is the great soporific. It’s a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there’s something interesting in their lives. It’s musical chairs in reverse. Every time the muzak stops people stand up and dance around the world, and more chairs are added to the circle, more marinas and Marriott hotels, so everyone thinks they’re winning.’

‘But it’s another con?’

‘Complete. Today’s tourist goes nowhere. … All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit. … Travel is the last fantasy the 20th Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.’

‘And that can’t be done?’

‘There’s nowhere to go. The planet is full. You might as well stay at home and spend the money on chocolate fudge.’

———————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.
———————————————————-

LEFT: Photo: Simon Sellars. Walking past STA Travel in Collingwood (Melbourne), I was struck by this advertisement: ‘I was mugged in Mexico.’ STA targets the thrillseeking youngish backpacker scene, and it seems to have finally realised the futility of promoting Mexico via the standard travel-industry imagery of tacos, burritos and tequilas to a street-smart, apparently narcissistic audience that has seen it all and done it all before. The logical next step: marketing its target group’s nightmares.

Mass tourism accelerates the shrinking-globe effect. The spidery net of information technology means forward planning is negligible and the time between decision and departure minimal. Dirt-cheap air fares wrap the planet in a grid of many-tentacled route maps, itineraries and carbon trails. The romantic notion of ‘untouched areas’ becomes extinct due to countless package tourists blithely following guidebook trails laid out in advance, and the cumulative effect is that we have reached a stage in which anything and everything is able to be seen and experienced simultaneously, an ‘accident of reality’, after Paul Virilio.

When asked ‘But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?’, Virilio replied ‘We’ll dream of being blind’. But to follow the Ballardian line of sight means the only place left to visit when the world has been stripmined of experience is the inside of your skull — and your deepest, darkest fears.

Next in the series: ‘I was bashed and left for dead by a pack of rabid alpha males high on ice in the Melbourne CBD.’

For a target group brought up on Eli Roth films, that would sure beat the taco-and-tequila-style cliches of ‘Melbourne: World’s Most Livable City’.

I phoned J.G. Ballard at his home early in September 1996, shortly before the publication of his novel, Cocaine Nights, the murder mystery set in the Costa Del Sol, whose ‘detective story’ format bears much the same relation to the book’s real themes as the skull does to the subconscious.

The interview was conducted for a short feature on the novel that ran in The List magazine (issue dated 20 September 1996), the Glasgow-Edinburgh events guide that is pretty much Scotland’s Time Out. This is the first time the full transcript of the conversation has been published anywhere.

Damien Love, 2007

Damien Love is a writer, journalist and independent publisher, based in Glasgow, UK.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: French edition, with a different title, ‘The Hidden Side of the Sun’.

DL: You still live in Shepperton. How long have you been based there now?

JGB: Oh god. Since… 1960. A long time.

And I take it you have no immediate desire to resign to the Costa Del Sol?

Oh, no. I have every desire to. I intend to go fairly soon. I think it’s time I warmed my old bones in the sun.

And settle into the lifestyle you’ve described?

Well… umm… yes. I wrote the book and then thought, well, it sounds rather fun. I must go and live there. I have been there, of course.

What was the genesis of Cocaine Nights?

Well, I think watching the growth of the Costa Del Sol and similar places along the Mediterranean over the last 40 years that I’ve been going there, and seeing a microcosm of a future that’s waiting for us all. You know, these security obsessed enclaves with tele-surveillance and armed guards and smart cards and all, the whole paraphernalia, like a kind of maximum security state, reduced to the size of a village. If you know the States at all, you’ll know there are masses of similar security compounds. And there have been for many, many years. But they’re coming, they’re all over Europe now. You can see them out in the Home Counties where I live, to the west of London. People are obsessed with security, at all costs. And you pay a price for it. And I can see this development beginning to isolate people, more and more, behind their triple-security locks, and they’ll pay an enormous price, in terms of social cohesion, civic life, you know, just to feel ‘safe.’

So, do you see any merits in the radical prescription to the problem prescribed by Crawford?

Well, I the author am not suggesting that we all go out and… burgle our neighbour’s houses, or take up drug trafficking, and the very next day we’ll all be practising our violins and forming chess clubs. But I’m saying that it’s possible that we’re too obsessed with security. Although, anyone who has just been burgled is going to think me an idiot. Quite rightly. But, it’s a matter of realising that, you know, certain things have to be bought at a price, and maybe the price is too high. Maybe, to make a pearl, you need a bit of grit in the oyster shell. I think, probably, that the proposition I’ve put forward in the novel is probably correct.

The novel reminded me of the conversation you had with Will Self, about a future of boredom springing up as consumer culture envelops the globe, and these Kafkaesque communities spring up into… living death…

Yes. Kafka with unlimited Chicken Kiev.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: Russian edition. RIGHT: Cocaine Nights: Italian edition.

The protagonist of the novel, Charles Prentice, is a travel writer, and, as is mentioned, an observer rather than a participant. Why make him so consciously someone who, initially at any rate, observes rather than interacts?

Well, he is an observer. I mean he’s a visitor to this strange place. And as a travel writer, he’s got a trained eye so that he is, as it were, more aware. More aware of the strangeness of this coast where the Brits have settled over the last thirty years, than the average person would be. As you drive along that coast, from Marbella to Malaga, or from Gibraltar to Malaga, you pass all these condominiums and pueblo-style housing estates, and you think ‘Well, they’re a bit odd, I wouldn’t want to live in one myself’. But you don’t realise how odd they are until you go into one, and then you realise that tens of thousands of Brits, along with Dutch and French and Germans and so on — many of them retired there permanently, are all living these very strange lives. I’m not just concerned with the Costa del Sol. What I’m interested in is an emerging psychology where people, for the sake of security or some other social end, are willing to sacrifice a large number of the stresses and strains that are a part of the price one pays for an active and lively and rich cultural mix. I don’t say that crime is necessary to kickstart a culture, I’m just saying that one must beware of extreme solutions.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: Latvian edition.

Are you — as a person and not a writer, as it were — consciously frightened of a future where people are so obsessed with themselves and their own security, that in a way they cease to be aware of themselves any more?

I think that we’re moving in that direction. As living standards continue to rise, as they have done since the war — and, I’m sure living standards will, on the whole, continue to rise — people have got more to lose. You know, they’ve packed their homes with high-tech electronic gear. It’s worth burgling the average suburban house, now. Many of them are equipped like TV studios, not to mention things like jewellery. So, one gets this strangely interiorised style of living, where you switch off the outside world, rather like it was some threatening television programme. You do this by treble locking your front door and switching on the alarm system, and then you retreat and watch videos of the World Cup. And that’s not a good recipe for healthy society. Looked at objectively, one could say that cinema, the visual arts, the ‘entertainment’ culture generally, are in a worse state than they have ever been this century. The cinema is a shadow of what it was in the forties. There’s scarcely a novelist worth reading. There’s scarcely a painter or sculptor worth looking at. I’m too old to know if the music scene has the vitality that it had back in the 60s, but I don’t imagine that it has. And, you know, we’re in a culture of substitutes — Elizabeth Hurley. They had Marilyn Monroe, we’ve got Elizabeth Hurley. Something’s gone wrong. Is it that we’re engineering a new kind of life for ourselves that has echoes of those that I describe in this book?

I take it that, if presented with the choice, you’d have no difficulty in choosing between living somewhere like the retirement pueblos on the coast or somewhere like Estrella de Mar?

Well, yeah. I would opt for somewhere like Estrella de Mar, where it’s lively. I mean, it’s silly to say this, because I’m not inviting anyone to come and steal my car or burgle my house; but one always assumes that totalitarian states will be imposed from the outside on the average citizen, that they’ll be sort of horrific and threatening. But in a way, I’ve often thought that the totalitarian systems of the future will be actually rather kind of subservient and ingratiating, and will be imposed from within. We’ll define the terms of the TV mono-culture which we now inhabit, and it’s a pretty empty place. I can imagine, 50 to 100 years from now, social-historians looking back at the closing years of the 20th century and saying, ‘My God, it opened with the flight of the Wright Brothers; halfway through they went to the moon; they discovered scientific miracle upon miracle. And then they ended with people sitting in their little fortified bungalows while the tele-surveillance cameras sweep the streets outside, and they watch reruns of The Rockford Files.’

It’s a nightmare vision.

ABOVE: Cocaine Nights: two Spanish editions.

You mentioned earlier the state of the cinema.

Well, there are exceptions, don’t get me wrong…

Of course. And there’s Crash. I take it you’ve seen the film, and reacted favourably?

Oh, very. I think it’s a brilliant film, an absolute masterpiece. Cronenberg’s best film, I think.

Do you think that any of the rest of us in the UK will ever get the chance to see it?

Oh well, I don’t know you see. I don’t know whether we’re mature enough to cope with such a film. I think the powers-that-be feel it may give us a rush of blood to the head. I hope that we get a chance to see it. It opened a couple of months ago in France, where it did extremely well. In its first week it was the top-grossing film at the French box office. Pretty remarkable when you bear in mind that it couldn’t be further away from the world of Twister and Mission: Impossible. I mean, it’s a serious film.

We’re at a very strange cultural state now. We’re so panicky, so frightened. So nervous of everything that goes on. Some ghastly tragedy happens, like the Dunblane disaster or Hungerford, and people feel that there must be an explanation, there’s got to be some kind of larger reason. Similar mass murders have taken place in England, like the Hungerford tragedy of some years ago, when this youth shot about fifteen or sixteen people, including his own mother. Something like that happens and people think, ‘My God, there must be something wrong with our society.’ And so they find the obvious culprits. After Hungerford people immediately jumped to the conclusion that Michael Ryan, or whatever his name was, had been watching all the Rambo films. Turned out that he hadn’t in fact; he didn’t even own a VCR. But people look for desperate remedies to make sense of some desperate tragedy, but it’s often the wrong way. I think that the distributors are frightened that there’ll be a huge outcry when Crash is released and hundreds of over-excited drivers will start crashing their cars into each other. It doesn’t seem to have happened in France. As far as I know. I think the film will have exactly the opposite effect, and calm everyone down.

Of course, we weren’t deemed mature enough as a society to see A Clockwork Orange, in that instance by the filmmaker himself.

Yeah, Kubrick himself, as you know, pulled that one. You can rent it anywhere else in the world. You can buy it. I bought one abroad, a copy of Clockwork Orange. But he decided for reasons of his own. I think he had young daughters at the time and they were threatened, so he pulled the plug on the film as far as Britain was concerned.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: German edition.

It seems strange that, in both cases, the country where the source material of the movie was generated is deemed unable to handle the film.

I know. But I mean, this country, we’re heavily censored. The sort of films that you can catch on your Adult Movie Channel in any hotel on the continent, we’d never see here in a million years. The sort of videos you can rent freely in the States will never be available here. We’re far too nervous. So many of the films we see are heavily cut, particularly on video. We’re very heavily censored here. People are frightened. Of course, it’s all bound up in the whole political system here — you can’t give the plebs too much freedom in one direction, because they might start asking for it in another. Who knows where it will end? You know. I think the film will be shown. It’s going to be shown at the London Film Festival in November, and then I think the company will distribute it themselves. I can’t believe that a Cronenberg film, starring Holly Hunter and James Spader and Rosanna Arquette, which won a prize at Cannes, is never going to see the light of day.

Your work has now been filmed by two very different directors. Do you think this says something about the work itself, or are Spielberg and Cronenberg similar in some way that might not be instantly apparent?

I don’t think there really are any similarities between Spielberg and Cronenberg. There aren’t any similarities between Empire of the Sun and Crash, of course. They are very different books. But Cronenberg, Spielberg and myself do share something in common, in that we all spent a large part of our careers in our own versions of science fiction. None of us were working in the mainstream SF field, but in a sort of marginal zone alongside mainstream SF, which we made our own, in different ways. I, in a sort of Inner Space direction, Spielberg more in the kind of…I don’t know how I would describe it…that sort of poetic SF almost, with something like Close Encounters, and Cronenberg in another kind of Inner Space of his own. So we have that in common. But I’ve been very, very lucky to have two of the greatest talents in present day cinema adapting novels of mine.

Is it a spurious piece of lazy critical shorthand to draw parallels between the character of Bobby Crawford in Cocaine Nights and Vaughan in Crash, these deviant Messiahs?

No, I think they are rather similar types, now that you mention it. I think they are. They’re kind of… they are deviant Messiahs. They’re sort of well intentioned psychopaths. They’re public-spirited psychopaths, a very curious blend. They genuinely want to do good and show people the truth. I know that sounds like Adolf Hitler. But neither Vaughan nor Crawford really want to do harm, to do bad for its own sake. Their idea is to do good. Take the blinkers off, show the truth. They’re both small-scale redeemers.

ABOVE: Cocaine Nights: audio book (detail).

It struck me that there are a lot of female doctors cropping up in your work. Is this a conscious, self-referential thing?

Well, I dunno how many there are. I mean, I’ve written a lot of stuff… Of course, I trained as a medical student, and I met a lot of young women doctors, who I probably will meet again, when my time is up. I think I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of the woman doctor but… that’s another story. But it’s true, there have been a few. There’s one in Crash and there’s one in Cocaine Nights .

And in Rushing to Paradise, too.

That’s true, that’s the sort of Margaret Thatcher figure. Another Messianic do-gooder. Another public-spirited psychopath.

Not quite as attractive, though?

Oh, I found her wonderfully attractive. I always had a thing for Margaret Thatcher. Until I grew too old for her.

Have you started on another project?

No, I haven’t. I’m moving ideas around, having a bit of a rest.

Do you have any notion of what might be your place in the British Literary scene, how you fit in?

None at all. I don’t fit in. I’m definitely outside the castle walls. I gather you have a fairly tight-knit Scottish literary scene. I don’t think the English one is like that, it’s very scattered. I get the impression that the Scots, rightly, are today very conscious of their national identity, whereas the English are losing theirs. They’re a bit lost. It’s very large and dispersed. I don’t know what part I play in it. I don’t think I play any part, actually.

Well, time’s about up.

Great. You’ve got enough for about seven lines. It’s been a pleasure. Best of luck.

Copyright © 1996 & 2007 by Damien Love

..:: MORE INFO
+ J.G. Ballard Live in London: Q&A transcripts from the same era discussing similar themes.

Here’s a quote:

Perreau: You once said “Nothing has any sense except in terms of ephemeral airplane culture”. Motorways, airplanes, shopping centres… What is the link between these things? What do humans do?

Ballard: They take planes and fly around, like the great soaring birds who endlessly cross and recross the ocean. Like the albatross, we are looking for our soul. Tourism is a rehearsal for death.

Above: the Ballard family’s former house, now lit up in the colours of capitalism. Photo: Rick McGrath.

“Do you believe in synchronicity?” Andy asked. “That’s the 10 o’clock signal for today’s national anniversary. Sirens are blowing all over the country right now.” He leaned in, conspiratorially. “It was precisely 70 years ago today the Japanese attacked China and bombed the crap outta Shanghai. Tuesday, September 18, 1937. The beginning of the end for everyone living around here. And Jim’s childhood.”

I was dumbfounded. No, gobsmacked. What were the odds of this happening on the one day I was here? It was like some temporal shift was taking place, and I was being swept along in a sort of dual timeline. The walls were coming together to form an angle.

Aircraft had always interested Jim, and especially the Japanese bombers that had devastated the Nantao and Hongkew districts of Shanghai in 1937. Street after street of Chinese tenements had been leveled to the dust, and in the Avenue Edward VII a single bomb had killed a thousand people, more than any other bomb in the history of warfare.

Rick McGrath has onlined the travelogue detailing his visit to J.G. Ballard’s former home in Shanghai, the sovereign domestic zone that played host to a number of resonant scenes in Empire of the Sun.

In 2006, using Google maps and good old snail mail, McGrath nailed the location. Later, I received an email from Andy Best in Shanghai: “Did you know Ballard’s former house is now a restaurant?” Knowing of Rick’s obsession, I forwarded it on. Rick was in touch with Andy, and then Rick was gone.

Arriving in Shanghai, Andy is his guide. They eat at Ballard’s house. The restaurant’s proprietor gets interested in a potential tie-in with the building’s unique history. They explore ‘other sites of Ballardian temporal archaeology’, including Lunghua Civilian Assembly Camp (now Shanghai High School), where Ballard and his family were interned.

The journey is surreal. Ballard freefalls in (non)space. The experience of Shanghai and Shepperton colours everything Ballard writes, or at least, everything he writes colours Ballard’s experience of Shanghai and Shepperton. Geographic boundaries dissolve in a mesh of psycho-spatial coordinates. But now, Rick McGrath is in the perfect position to weave a scale cartography of the inside of J.G. Ballard’s head.

First phase: ‘doorstepping’ JGB in Shepperton earlier this year. Second phase: Shanghai Central.

..:: MORE

+ Chris Mitchell, of jgballard.com, has an appreciative appraisal of Rick’s Shanghai trip from a travel writer’s perspective at his other site, Travel Happy.
+ Compare Rick’s photos of the house and its innards with Ballard’s own return to Shanghai, as documented in Shanghai Jim.