I saw George Romero’s zombie flick Dawn of the Dead for the first time at the Melbourne International Film Festival last night. What a super film. What a statement. And very, very funny too. And in fact very reminiscent of Kingdom Come, for Dead, like KC, also features a sealed-off shopping mall in which a band of resistance fighters attempt to restart a micro society, sustained yet ultimately imprisoned by the trappings of consumer capitalism.

The mall in both Ballard and Romero becomes a city, a country, a galaxy, a self-sustaining micronational state seceding from reality, a State of mind absorbing and zombifying all it touches, and the faceless, cartoonish football hordes in KC are consumer zombies as much as the walking dead in Romero are metaphorically intended to be.

Yet, if you tweak your perspective just a little, the survivors in both could conversely be read as the oppressors, the old world clinging to its accumulated wealth, hording it for themselves in the face of the zombie attack — an all-devouring, ever-growing underclass.

For Romero, like Ballard, is nothing if not a master of ambivalence.

The most Ballardian part of the film is when the survivors seal off a department store — privileged retail space — from the zombies in the mall’s concourse, ie the tacky public domain. The survivors turn on the store’s muzak and roam the aisles to take whatever they want from the limitless, yet depthless wonders of consumerism, free to act out their decadent bourgeois fantasies, setting up their attic space with expensive furniture and luxury TV sets, even though the apocalypse that has blighted the outside world means there is nothing to watch anymore.

Watching this sequence, I could almost imagine yet another parallel world in which KC was written in the late 70s, and George Romero, the master of guerilla filmmaking — an aesthetic and a philosophy that informs the guerilla responses in his storylines — had become the first director to adapt Ballard for the big screen, setting the tone for future Ballard adaptations to come: raw, uncompromising, revolutionary, and shot through with the blackest humour, the perfect defence against insanity.

In short: how Ballard’s books, and Romero’s films, appear to me.

‘The Metro-Centre is secure … Withdraw all army units … Repeat, the Metro-Centre is secure … We have hostages … Repeat, we have hostages …’
…
I stared at the heavy shield, and helped the elderly man to the chair by the enquiry desk. He thanked me and said: ‘Your foot’s bleeding.’

‘I know. Tell me — are we sealed in?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘The North Gate entrance?’

‘I imagine that’s also closed.’

‘And the side exits?’

‘Everything. The car parks and freight entrance.’…

‘…these shopping malls haven’t learned how to cope with violence. When they do…’

‘War will move into the world’s consumer spaces? That’s quite a thought. Up till now, buying a washing machine has been a safe option…’

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

In the latest attack in Gauteng, a policeman was critically injured in a shoot-out with a gang of 12 bombers armed with AK47 and R5 assault rifles. In the early hours of Friday morning the gang took control of a parking lot at Bracken City shopping centre, in Brackenhurst, south of Johannesburg. They took about 20 people hostage before blowing up a First National Bank ATM.

“They were like a mini army. The shoot-out ensued when the police heard the explosion and came to investigate,” police spokesman Steady Nawa said.

News report, the Times (South Africa), 2008.

One of the country’s most acclaimed novelists has called for the Bluewater Centre, in Kent, to be obliterated. In London Orbital, a film inspired by Iain Sinclair’s book of the same title to be broadcast tonight on Channel 4, JG Ballard declares in conversation with Sinclair: “Iain, I want you to blow up Bluewater.” Sinclair then verbally batters the hapless shopping centre, a pimple just south of the M25. It is, he says, “a zone where only the fake is truly authentic, the retail swamp on the borders of everything, grandiloquent and meaningless as one of Saddam Hussein’s arches”. Staff at the centre seem surprised by the vitriol. “I don’t know if in the current climate inciting people to blow things up is such a good idea,” says a spokesman. “Anyhow, what’s all this about swamps? I thought we had some quite nice lakes.”

Sholto Byrnes, The Independent, 29 October, 2002.

Ralph Rugoff, writing in Frieze, called Bluewater a “diuretic slurry of pumped-up historical and decorative emblems”. “Citizens of England!” cried Hugh Pearman in the Sunday Times, “We do not need these places!” Contemplating the 20,000-person village, also designed by CivicArts, that will eventually adjoin the mall, Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian envisioned “a city with no gods other than Prada, Gucci and Starbucks, with no cathedral and temple beyond the naves and domes of the mall itself, and with no ultimate purpose beyond stupefying consumption.”

It is easy to adopt this sort of anti-materialist scorn towards Kuhne’s shopping centres. And since Kuhne himself described Bluewater as “a city rather than a retail destination,” it is safe to assume that his cities may resemble his malls. This possibility excites Kuhne; he has faith in retail. “Retail,” he tells the audience in Dubai, “is the only industry that can manage our city centres… We are the only ones who deal with experience. We are the only ones that understand how to customise and modify and release and replan and reorganise and administer a luscious experience for a group.”

Peter C. Baker quoting Bluewater’s architect, Eric Kuhne, The National, 1 May, 2008.

A former English teacher pleaded guilty yesterday to threatening criminal damage, having talked of a plan to blow up Europe’s largest shopping complex. Saeed Ghafoor made his threat to prison officers while serving a jail term in February this year. He claimed he would target the Bluewater centre using three limousines loaded with gas canister explosives.
…
When officers told him that the centre, the target of a previous fertiliser bomb plot by Islamic terrorists last year, was in fact in Kent, he said he had not yet fully “finalised” his scheme. Pierce Arnold, for the prosecution, told the Old Bailey: “Mr Ghafoor made the threat. We do not know if he could have carried it out. It was not a bomb hoax. It appeared on the face of it to be a serious threat by someone who was not happy.”
…
The first officer to hear his claim believed him a fantasist but took his remarks seriously. Ghafoor said he was protesting at the involvement of British and American troops in Afghanistan. He was also seen by the prison imam, who formed the impression that the prisoner was susceptible to brainwashing.

Jonathan Brown, The Independent, 24 May, 2008.

Teacher admits threatening to blow up Bluewater shopping centre.

I wonder if they’ll arrest Ballard next.

‘But when questioned about his plot, Ghafoor, 33, of Southampton, did not appear to know where the shopping centre was, the Old Bailey heard.’

Ah, but he was right, because Bluewater is everywhere, Bluewater is us. We must blow ourselves up. It’s the only solution.

Infinite Thought, 24 May, 2008.

J.G Ballard and Iain Sinclair’s threat to blow up Bluewater … taken rather more seriously when delivered by a (shock-horror) Muslim — who nonetheless had the impression that Bluewater was in Exeter, but that’s being let pass. Two quick points here: one, I was faintly intrigued to find that the threatener in question was not only from Southampton, but from the Flower Estate (so why he didn’t want to blow up West Quay is beyond me); and two, it makes this interview with the designer of Bluewater and its ilk (via) even more grimly compelling. The gist: Bluewater is what people want, when an industrial site is cleared – shops, lots of them, ‘contextual’ architecture, and many many parking spaces. If there’s a despot locally who can help the process along then that’s good too. In fact, Bluewater seen like this is reminiscent of ‘Most Wanted Paintings’ the Sots Art prank where the votes of a given area for what they most wanted to see in a painting get totted up, with the results appropriately ridiculous.

Owen Hatherley, Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy, 25 May, 2008.

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ When in Doubt, Quote Ballard: An Interview with Iain Sinclair

Above: the offending vehicle.

The Zodiac 3000 exhibition in Birmingham, dedicated to and inspired by Ballard, has already drawn first blood, severely disrupting the stasis of surrounding Brum suburbia. As my snout, Tim C., notes, “in a minor mirroring of the moral outrage occasioned by Ballard’s 1970 Arts Lab exhibition, the Birmingham Mail is on the case”:

THIS clapped-out car may look ready for the breakers’ yard, but angry Birmingham families have been told it is “art”. Fuming residents at Maple Road, Bournville, today blasted art centre bosses for allowing the “eyesore” to be left yards from their homes.

The Mercedes is on display outside Bournville Centre for Visual Arts as part of a month-long exhibition devoted to the work of British author JG Ballard, who wrote the controversial novel Crash.

Residents said it lowered the tone of George Cadbury’s model village. Cadbury worker Robert Potter, aged 59, said: “It’s an eyesore. This is a nice area, and we are trying to keep up standards. It would be towed away if it was parked on the street.”

Crash, published in 1973, features characters who become sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. It was later filmed by Canadian director David Cronenberg.

Art exhibition curator Andrew Hunt said: “Art is meant to be provocative. “Ballard is fixated with white, middle-class suburbs, which Bournville is. It’s holding a mirror to the idea of white ghettoes and the ideology behind them.

The house that Sam built … from Pam.

MelbPsy gets all Atrocity Exhibition on Sam Newman’s ass house:

“As he stood beneath the fractured, glacial stare of Pamela Anderson, her linear geometry echoed a television howl. Vomit, violence, tabloid architecture. Was this, he wondered, the denouement of the French Revolution?”

For those outside of Australia, Newman is a local type, an ex-footballer who built a new career out of being an all-purpose media boor. So the script goes, nothing is beyond him, whether it’s allegedly monstering pregnant women in supermarkets or, yes, erecting a larger-than-life facade of Pamela Anderson (“we’re just good friends,” says Sam) to breast his inner-city property.

MelbPsy’s ironic appropriation of the Atrocity aesthetic is completely appropriate, then, given that book’s concern with irradiated images of celebrity culture beamed aloft on 400ft-high billboards:

“He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital — the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor Pammy Anderson. 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.”

JGB, Atrocity, 1970.

Sam Newman: “Most people are wankers…”

In Atrocity, when the main character erects mindscapes and celebrity billboards, he’s using the radiation of the media landscape against itself in order to clear autonomous zones — “neural intervals” — ready for inscription by brand-new auratic powers…

…while Newman has been run over by his girlfriend in her car (giving him a broken leg and ankle) and has been beaten up by an ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend (giving him a broken nose). Yet Sam has used these highly publicised sexual pecadilloes to create his own independent nation, the United State of Sam, seceding from Australia on the back of its strident Constitution, customised and retooled from all that negative publicity and now reoccupying and re-broadcasting across all media:

“Most people you meet are wankers, pure and simple. Women are schemers, men are liars. That is all you have to remember … I’m just about the only heterosexual left in my street. I’m thinking of leaving the country before being gay becomes compulsory. I like women. Just remember they are schemers.”

Sammy, 2003.

He has been punched out not once but twice by separate footballers live on air, and is renowned for his trademark phrase, “You idiot,” hurled indiscriminately at the public — at mental defectives, immigrants, grannies, junkies, any old trash — while doing his roving “Street Talk” segments for The Footy Show, the sport-hooligan fest that made his TV name and on which he appeared in blackface after Aboriginal footballer Nicky Winmar failed to make his scheduled slot. He has more enemies than Max Gogarty, yet remains a wildly popular and highly paid celebrity.

According to this puffpiece, he serves an all-purpose role, functioning equally as virtual gigolo and cathartic release for the pent-up violence of ordinary lives:

“No small part of Newman’s attractiveness to women (and make no mistake about it, Sam Newman has a good deal to do with “The Footy Show”‘s enormous popularity with women, who watch it in greater numbers than do men), is the impression he conveys of being a man who does not lose his temper. This is a man you can thump in the chest, reprimand, tease — without risking being hit. And this is a man you can flirt with, show your legs to (as did one elderly woman in a notable “Street Talk” segment), without fear that he will “lose control.”
…
Sam does not “control” himself. Sam calls idiots idiots. It does not really matter (to most of the audience) whether or not they are idiots, whether or not Sam has quoted them or represented them fairly. It matters that someone says what he bloody well reckons. Those without Sam’s license (women, for instance) can enjoy this vicariously.”

If you’ve read Kingdom Come, which of course charts The Rise and Fall of TV hack David Cruise and his Minders from Staines, Sam might be sounding familiar by now:

“It was tuned to the Metro-Centre cable channel, and showed an afternoon discussion programme transmitted from the mezzanine studio. The suntanned face of David Cruise dominated everything, and covered the proceedings like a cheap but over-bright lacquer. He was smiling and affable, but faintly hostile, like a bullying valet. Perhaps people in the motorway towns liked to be shouted at.”

“‘So David Cruise is the führer? He’s fairly benign.’

‘He’s a nothing. He’s a “virtual” man without a real thought in his head. Consumer fascism provides its own ideology, no one needs to sit down and dictate Mein Kampf. Evil and psychopathy have been reconfigured into lifestyle statements. It’s a fearful prospect, but consumer fascism may be the only way to hold a society together. To control all that aggression, and channel all those fears and hates.’”

“Cruise’s obsessions and sexual hang-ups were the compass-dance of a demented king bee, guiding the hive to a destination it had already chosen. His chat-show act, based on scripts I tailored around him, might be a performance, but it validated the hunger and restlessness of his audience. The housewives mailing their photographs to him were performing rituals of assent, expressing their longing for a faith beyond politics.”

“David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport.”

“‘One thing David Cruise had was an unlimited supply of enemies. That was part of his strategy. You know that, Richard. You planned it that way.’”

All quotes, Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Oh yes. Now I remember how Kingdom Come ends…

Our man David Cruise in his latest campaign… Photo courtesy Metro-Centre.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Melborea Moronica: New ‘Depraved Species of Electric Flora’ Found Growing in Melbourne, Australia
+ The Rats that Ate Mill Park
+ The Drought: Water Vigilantes
+ John Howard: The Conspiracy of Grey Men

+ 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.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

An Interview with Paul Plamper and Niklas Goldbach
by Dan O’Hara

In July on the roof terrace of the Ludwigsmuseum, the major museum of modern art in Cologne, I attended a ‘screening’ of a radio play. I say ‘screening’ because a film had been made to accompany the play, the combined effect of audio and film a little like Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Called Hochhaus, the play was a three-part adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. A faithful rendition in terms of plot and themes, it transposed the action of the novel to Berlin in the near future. The programme described the play as follows:

Berlin, 2013. A star architect has built in the capital the tallest residential building in Europe. There he wants to create a social Utopia: the Neokommune K 13. Nothing is wanting in this autarchy, a completely self-sufficient closed system. But the high-rise becomes a pressure cooker of neighbourhood enmity and rampant, uninhibited class warfare. In the blink of a camera’s eye, this modern super-community regresses into a biotope of primitive lifeforms. Based on J. G. Ballard’s science fiction novel, Paul Plamper has produced a horror radio play of pressing sociological relevance, which could take place in every German home. “Never forget: You are Hochhaus!”

With the Kölner Dom looming behind the roof terrace, and a panorama of the city stretching away towards the west, some fifty or sixty people settled down to listen for three hours to the German version of High-Rise. At nine in the evening, the sky was at first still too bright for the audience to see much of the film, so many of them sat with their heads down or eyes closed, concentrating on listening. In any case the film appeared to be merely a static image of a huge skyscraper, a carbuncle of a compressed city, a futurist mockery of the Gothic Cathedral at our backs.

There were some very interesting angles taken in terms of adaptation – the film was made in parts of the old GDR, and there were persistent echoes of and references to Nazism, Speer’s social engineering through architecture being one of the more telling ones. I spoke to the author, Paul Plamper, and his colleague Niklas Goldbach, a video artist who made the accompanying film. Radio plays or ‘Hörspiele’ are hugely popular in Germany – the original broadcast, on WDR in November 2006, reached around 100,000 listeners – and Ballard is relatively unknown, so this radio adaptation would introduce Ballard’s name to an audience that had hitherto encountered him only through Cronenberg and Spielberg’s films. I wanted to find out why Plamper and Goldbach had chosen to adapt High-Rise. What relevance did Ballard’s 1975 novel have, in their view, for the Germany of the near future?

Dan O’Hara teaches English & American Literature at the University of Cologne. He is currently working on a monograph on J. G. Ballard.

NOTE: Performances of Hochhaus are due to restart on 12 January 2008 at the Theater Mannheim. See the endnote for more information.

DAN: Can I ask you first of all why you chose to adapt High-Rise? Because, as far as I’m aware, Ballard’s not very well known in Germany.

PAUL: No, he’s not that well known, actually. At least not when I was searching for a German translation of High-Rise a few years ago. There were some rare copies of an old edition being traded on the internet. I got hold of one of those and was immediately attracted. In Germany, the cultural establishment builds up a strong frontier between what they call ‘culture’ and what they call ‘entertainment’, and I think some, uhm, stupid intellectuals put Ballard more in the ‘entertainment’ Schublade, the entertainment category. But on the other hand you also have thinkers like Heiner Müller being admirers, so…

DAN: Really? I didn’t know about that. Heiner Müller, the ‘Hamletmaschine’ author?

PAUL: Yes, the dramatist. He liked science fiction and he liked crime literature. So, as you see, you find Ballard in different cultural circles. The science fiction and fantasy communities read him, and from time to time an open minded intellectual. That’s what I like about Ballard, he’s not easy to put in just one bracket.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: So what was it particularly about this one novel? What did you have in mind when you adapted it?

PAUL: Well, concerning the themes, I was looking for material for a ‘horror’ radio play. I wanted to do a monster radio play without monsters, but with humans. I discovered that Ballard is rather a specialist in this subject, and that his well-cultivated and very sensitive paranoia really makes him somewhat of a prophet; you know, he wrote the novel in 1975, and now the novel is being slowly caught up by reality. He was paranoiac enough to know what was going to happen.

I’m also looking for interesting acoustical situations for my radio plays. In High-Rise there’s a small society in a very condensed space. If you just look at social interaction: when it’s silent, you hear your neighbours in your room. The wall is something that separates you from them but the level of audio is really what separates you the least. You don’t see them but you hear them. So the sort of social pressure which has to be related is really well-suited to a radio play. I’m always searching for interesting topics, but most of all for subject matters that must be a radio play and no other medium, film, or whatever.

DAN: You move the action to future Berlin; I’m very intrigued by this shift.

PAUL: Well, since Ballard wrote High-Rise, things that happen in the novel now really happen in the middle of society, in public, in the media. So we thought, we won’t put the building in a suburb, as Ballard does – in the novel it’s in the outskirts of London, hidden away, where these terrible things can happen because nobody takes notice of it. We put our house right in the middle of Berlin, and it’s a prestigious project run by an architect who is a very adept publicist. He’s played by Martin Wuttke and we named him Philip del Ponte, a character like Daniel Libeskind or similar, you know, people who make grand architectural gestures and yet who are at the same time extremely clever in developing cute ideas to sell their architecture and to be in the public eye. We moved the whole story to the border of the Spree – this is actually 100 metres from here, where I live. Where before, there was the Wall, now there’s a gap at the river, and there are vast areas where a new centre is being developed for the media, MTV moved there for example. And there are gated communities. They’re like a virus spreading in Berlin. They have all these phony names like “Prenzlauer Gärten”. Well-to-do creative people start these projects like community projects; everybody has his financial interest, buys part of the building and thinks he invests in a social project.

NIKLAS: But there’s a new meaning to ‘social’ for these people. It doesn’t have anything to do with the social vision of Ballard or anyone in the ’70s for example…

DAN: It’s not to do with community?

NIKLAS: No. Well, maybe it is, but not with the idea of a social system where the stronger help the poor, for example. I don’t think you could find anything like the social system Ballard presents in High-Rise nowadays in Berlin.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: When I think of gated communities in England, the ones that Ballard’s talked about for example in Running Wild, his 1988 novel, in which some children living in a gated community kill their parents, such gated communities are very upper-middle class, and people choose to live in them apparently because of fear. These are high-security environments with surveillance cameras, private security guards… I wonder if it’s the same sort of thing in Berlin?

PAUL: We’re talking about something new. This certainly exists, but what interests us right now even more is that you have such gated communities combined with the fact that you can buy being a ‘good person’. You can purchase a good feeling by moving into a living community of house owners. In the 60s and 70s there was the start of the Kommune in Germany, Kommune Eins and so on. Now it’s part of the market, and there’s no contradiction at all. Communal feeling has been absorbed by the market. It goes together with the fact that, yes, of course these people live gated, because they say “ok, I’m moving near Kreuzberg, how exciting, a real ghetto, so I have to protect our stuff a little bit. Generally I’m open minded, come on, I was punk in the 80s, but still, I don’t want to get robbed.” They’re not really frightened, they think they’re just rationally pragmatic.

NIKLAS: And also I think what’s kind of key for Berlin, I mean, you live Dan in Cologne, right?

DAN: I do now, yes.

NIKLAS: Cologne has a completely different structure as a city from Berlin, obviously, because of the separation and the Wall. Berlin was for such a long time a kind of playground for people to try out new social structures, but lately there’s this gentrification process in Berlin that’s really overwhelming. In Kreuzberg, which was or which still is an alternative quarter of the city, now there are rich people moving in and all these condominiums being built. I saw one house where you can park your car in front, on the same level as your apartment, to make it safer for you. So there are all these weird architectural ideas popping up, and then there are other areas like Prenzlauer Berg which is in former East Berlin, where you have a real gentrification melting point, where only families live and everybody behaves as if they live in a small village. So especially from that point of view, it makes total sense to put High-Rise in Berlin. Where else in Europe right now? Probably in East Europe soon, but right now this is the place where most of the gentrification is happening, or where it’s visible. A lot of money moved to Berlin because it’s the capital, and there are so many real gated communities: there’s one right in the middle of the city for example, next to a park, the ‘Volkspark Friedrichshain’; and they have a doorman. You can only get in if you pass the doorman, and then you have a street, and a pool, and little houses, like a suburb. And this is happening in 2007 – in the center of Berlin; Paul makes Hochhaus happen in 2013, not that far away. And I don’t think it’s that much of a utopia.

PAUL: We have a doorman called Weingarten in the radio play, played by an old actor from the East who I met at the Berliner Ensemble, Heinrich Buttchereit. He has a Stasi pass in the play; he’s been hired by del Ponte because he has the best techniques in surveillance and security… They’re just very well trained. At one point, when there’s an escalation of the situation in the house, Weingarten says: “it’s just as before: we don’t have the Wall in a vertical sense anymore, now it’s horizontal, in the house, between the upper class and the lower class.” He says “ok, now I have my Wall back!”

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: There’s a great deal of political content in your adaptation; and with these references to Weingarten being ex-Stasi and, also, Niklas, I think you said you’d filmed some parts in the ex-GDR, was that right?

NIKLAS: Yeah, that’s true.

DAN: There are echoes – deliberate echoes? – of the GDR, of the Stasi and of Nazi Germany. What’s the point of these echoes for your audience? What are you trying to say to them?

NIKLAS: Well, Berlin has changed so much, at least for me. My background is that I’m a visual artist, a video artist, and most of my work is about the role of the individual in a world on the edge of dystopia. Maybe this is a very pessimistic view – let’s say it’s an artistic view, it’s maybe not only my personal view. I’d worked with Paul before, on another radio play called Release that actually took place in a prison. He told me about his new play, and invited me to a pre-listening session, and I thought about images that could occur within the three acts of the audio play. First of all I went straight to the point where Paul’s fictional high-rise would stand, between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, right on the border where the Wall was. I went and took photos. It’s a vast area, and I thought, well, what kind of architecture could be in this area?

All the three parts of the radio play are filmed in the former GDR, there’s not a single West German building. I think there are several reasons for that, but one reason is for example that the GDR system seems like a mixture of dystopia and utopia to me – it started as a utopia – of a social project. Del Ponte, the architect in the radio play, his idea is to make a social project that combines different classes of people. And this is actually what the GDR system had in common with del Ponte – maybe. His idea is to get rid of classes in this building; and that was also an idea of the GDR – West Germany never had that idea.

PAUL: You know, Ballard puts a big focus on the social classes in his novel, and at first you think, oh, the social classes, nowadays those concepts sound really seventies, but actually my thoughts are the exact opposite. West Germany since WWII has tried to have this soziale Marktwirtschaft – a social market economy – and until the beginning or the middle of the ’90s, it worked quite well. Do you have this expression, the ‘social scissor’? It’s a like a scissor that’s wide or narrow: you have the classes drifting apart from each other or closer to each other. Up to the `90s, the scissor was half closed, but in the last ten years, this has been completely, outrageously reversed. Now you have the underprivileged again; you have a small upper class getting richer and more powerful. I thought that we had to start talking about classes again. Ballard wrote about them in 1975, and now it’s back, it’s a very hot topic again.

Part two of the radio play is really about this. And at the same time it’s like a fast-forward history of the extreme Left in Germany. From the initial spontaneous protests in the sixties, the fun Sponti actions, up to the Red Army Faction in the late seventies, which got to be rather violent and militarily organized. The camera-man Andreas Lang – in the novel he’s called Wilder – lives on the ground floor. Lang, played by Milan Peschel, is accused of having killed the first human in the house, the second victim after the dog. Lang’s first reaction to the accusation is to gather people around him, to play Skat, a card game. As an act of political protest, they play cards in front of the supermarket on the 23rd floor, and then their protest gets more violent. Lang moves from being a buddy of the underprivileged, to being their leader. He leads a Feldzug…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: Like a battle, a campaign.

PAUL: They go up the high-rise, trying to burn the food stores of the upper class. Barricades have already been built from sofas and so on, so that there’s no access to the upper floors anymore. Lang and his followers succeed in burning the food stores, and in a very irrational moment they announce hunger for the whole house.

NIKLAS: Their slogan is “Solidarity with the hungry people in this world”.

DAN: When I’m looking at your original blurb for the Ludwigsmuseum, it’s called a ‘Horror Hörspiel’. And yet…

PAUL: A sociological horror Hörspiel…

DAN: … yes. And yet there’s a huge amount of political content here.

PAUL: Ballard is a political author for me. Many pages in the novel are about the class system. I like his political content; but at the same time I fear that we sound like a couple of humorless Germans now, who do heavy, grey, intellectual type stuff, but don’t get us wrong, the radio play is meant to be pure entertainment; it has the rhythm of an action movie…

NIKLAS: This is what we said in the beginning about Ballard himself, that this is an entertaining book which also has the quality of political comment. It’s supposed to be entertaining, but there’s obviously a deeper meaning to it. For example, look at the function of del Ponte, the architect, as opposed to Andreas Lang, the leader of the revolution. Especially in 2007, I think a lot of different types like del Ponte are out there, you know, private people or private investors who take over functions of the state. He’s a private person sponsoring the lower class like, for example, some celebrities or rich people today give some of their earnings back to the lower class. So it’s a bit ambivalent, what he’s doing. To the outside world he looks like he’s a really good guy but in the end, he’s the one who’s living in the penthouse.

DAN: I wondered if you also had a sense of the fact that, in the book, there’s a very specific relationship between Wilder and Anthony Royal – between Andreas Lang and del Ponte in Hochhaus – there’s this Oedipal backstory in the novel. In a sense it’s as if Ballard’s using that psychological backstory to make a political point.

PAUL: Well, we have the same two characters – the big antipodes – and we pretty much go along with Ballard’s narrative. In the end, Andreas Lang, our Wilder, when he’s already quite animal-like, mounts to the upper floors and kills del Ponte. It’s almost the same story. And then he gets eaten by the women, by the Matriarchat.

When I read the novel, I felt that Ballard really likes to develop the characters and their steps in a psychologically logical order. He has plenty of time to explain what could be the psychological background of Wilder doing what he does, and of his regression into animal status and so on. But in a radio play you don’t have that much time; and also I had the sense that in 2006 you don’t have to explain why people freak out, it’s so obvious, that utopia is, I don’t know… I have the impression that Ballard still felt some sort of friction with a positive utopian vision of a society, and so he described its regression into a barbarian state. Sometimes I thought that Ballard in the novel places his figures in a kind of sociological chess game. This figure moves from here to there because of this and that. I didn’t feel it necessary to explain so much in our radio play. The dynamic is a musical dynamic.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN:I can see that perhaps you don’t need so much narration. But you did introduce a narrator, didn’t you? There’s an extra-diegetic voice.

PAUL: Yeah; the great Volker Spengler is the narrator. You might know him from his films with Fassbinder. Like in Greek tragedy where you have the person who sees things and advances them, his narrator seems to know everything. He’s the transcendent voice. Volker just does it merely by his great personality and his destroyed voice, which breathes a lot of what he has lived.

DAN: Yeah, he has a wonderful voice. What specific narrative changes did you make in the adaptation? You introduce an external narrator; you shift to a straight chronological narrative…

PAUL: A listener can’t grasp 30 people like in the novel, he has to concentrate a lot to get to know even 10. So my co-author, Kai Hafemeister and I tried to take as few characters as possible, so that we still could see this as a small society that evolves. We have eight or so main characters, and not many very small parts, because I personally have a big aversion to this ‘protagonist and many small parts’ thing. We try to create an emotional involvement with each character. We wanted to have characters that you want to get to know better with each episode, because they were broadcast on three consecutive Fridays. So we had to make you want to continue to spend your time with these horrible people.

DAN: And what function does the voice-over narration serve?

PAUL: He’s telling as much as is needed, as seldom as possible. When we call it a sociological horror radio play, he’s the horror part – supported of course by the soundtrack, which is by SchneiderTM. Spengler’s voice… It’s so difficult to describe it. Like a field in which an atomic bomb exploded… He has a post-World War Three voice…

DAN: It reminded me of Vincent Price or Christopher Lee…

NIKLAS: He’s the same kind of character…

PAUL: At the end-credits, Volker always says, ‘And remember: You – are High-rise…’ This is an allusion to a recent campaign of the CDU government in Germany. They wanted to try to impose more national feeling on us. You had all these stupid billboards – saying ‘You Are Germany’ everywhere. So Volker concludes each part – they get more and more horrifying – with ‘You Are High-rise’.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Are you concerned about nationalism at the moment? In Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come, he’s turned his attention towards specifically English nationalism.

PAUL: Yeah, I understand that. We recorded our radio play right before the soccer World Cup in 2006. There were young Germans with flags and the national colours on their faces, a new kind of ‘pop nationalism’. After what happened in the Nazi era, Germans thought they could finally show an non-violent national feeeling, just as in other countries. They had the feeling that everybody steps together, that we are a stronger society. This also infected our way of telling High-Rise, that people are trying to create this new community. And then you see what happens to it. Which would lead you, as a society as a whole, to the next war. In High-Rise, it leads you to the terrible end. I don’t know; I look at history as something cyclical, and not so much as a regression into a barbarian state. We tell the story of only one high-rise, and in the end we put a bigger accent on the fact that the women take over, as after WWII it was the Trümmerfrauen, the ‘rubble women’, in Germany who rebuilt society, and really started the German Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle. After WWII, it was the women who cleaned up the men’s mess. Like the Matriarchat in the novel. We emphasized this; you see there’s a new order evolving; it starts again, a cycle.

We have a saying, vor der eigenen Tür kehren – to take the brush and clean in front of your own door – and that’s what Kai and me are trying to do. We’re trying to tell the story as close as possible to us, as if it could happen next to us, as if it could happen within us. Of course that’s something that is much bigger than the rise of nationalism right now. It’s like High-Rise being an image for a deliberate prison, and this prison which is self-chosen just displaces your view of another prison, which is Homo sapiens not getting out of his monstrous skin. Homo sapiens has this trait of this monstrosity; let’s face the fact. It’s a very Ballardian thought. Goya once said ‘I don’t fear witches, or poltergeists, or ghosts, or braggers or giants, or evil men; I fear no creature but one – the human.’ He said that in 1790, and I think Ballard could have said the same thing. It’s really about human nature, High-Rise. All these allusions in Hochhaus to the downfall of the socialist system, or how they killed their own ideals in socialist realism – all of these elements are products of, and evolve from, human nature.

DAN: I don’t know if you came across Concrete Island, the novel before High-Rise? For a later edition, Ballard wrote a new introduction in which he refers to both Crash and High-Rise. He says something very close to what you’re saying, and what Goya said; he writes: “[A]s well as the many physical difficulties facing us there are the psychological ones. How resolute are we, and how far can we trust ourselves and our own motives? Perhaps, secretly, we hope to be marooned, to escape our families, lovers and responsibilities. Modern technology, as I tried to show in Crash and High-Rise, offers an endless field-day to any deviant strains in our personalities.” Which is precisely the point you’re also making, no?

PAUL: Yeah. And he also talks in High-Rise about the suppression of anti-social behaviour; the anti-social as something we have to suppress. But regarding Philip del Ponte, our architect, why he’s called that. It’s because there is an original for High-Rise. It’s called the Ponte Tower in Johannesburg. This is why in the beginning I was talking of Ballard as a prophet, because in Johannesburg you had in reality what Ballard’s story depicts. The Ponte Tower is 173m high, 54 floors high, with 2500 people living there and 470 apartments, and it was founded in the seventies too, as the most prestigious tower in town. Up to 2004 it was the biggest building south of the equator. In Johannesburg, you can see it from everywhere. It’s round, and in the middle you have this cylindrical space; it’s like a gigantic trash bin. After a while the Ponte Tower was full of drugs, gang wars and people throwing themselves from the floors – many, many people killed themselves by jumping into the building, into the middle – and everybody threw his trash in the middle so that there was three floors of trash. The whole building stunk terribly. Things were out of control at the Ponte, completely out of control. People trying to hire other people who owned guns to go out and do their shopping for them, because it was too dangerous; the elevators not functioning; child prostitution – it was incredible. You think, ah, Ballard must have known about this, but then the Ponte was founded in 1976 – Ballard wrote High-Rise only one year before. So our architect is called Philip del Ponte because of this tower; though he has an aristocratic ‘del’ in front of the ‘Ponte’…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: To correspond with the ‘Royal’ of Anthony Royal, I suppose, yes?

PAUL: Yes.

DAN: It’s an unusual format; a radio play with a film accompanying it. Is this part of a bigger project, or a general direction you’re taking with your own work?

PAUL: We did the radio play first, and then I thought of how to present it in public because I thought it could be interesting to show it at the Hörspielzentrale, in a series of radio play events at the Hau, a theatre in Kreuzberg. Then of course I thought of Niklas, because he’s a specialist in architecture. We should describe the videos, no, Niklas?

DAN: I did want to ask you about the film for the first episode. There’s a sentence in High-Rise: “They would film the exteriors from a helicopter, and from the nearest block four hundred yards away – in his mind’s eye he could already see a long, sixty-second zoom, slowly moving from the whole building in frame to a close-up of a single apartment, one cell in this nightmare termitary.” Which is more or less exactly your first film, no?

NIKLAS: Yeah it is. But to be honest this is a coincidence… When Paul asked me to join Hochhaus, my first intention was to read the book, and then we decided, maybe it’s better if I don’t read the book… So instead I tried to concentrate on the characters in Paul’s version of High-Rise. And, as Paul said, most of my work is about the human environment and urbanism, and it has some formal characteristics. In my video work, for example, one of the characteristics is the manipulation of time and the control of the image, and the use of of post-production. It’s mostly about personal feelings of alienation or mass cultural fantasies; the key themes of the latest works are the contradictions between public and private spheres. I try to examine how this comes down to a personal level, and try to use video – this is a cheesy metaphor, but maybe it’s allowed – to use video as a temporal microscope, trying to capture the moment where the subconscious shifts objectivity. This is why I was completely blown away when I listened to the first version of Hochhaus, because what Paul had done on the audio level was actually what I’m trying to do on the video level in my work, because Hochhaus is highlighting the political tensions between these visions of utopia and the subjective experiences of individuals. Also, I think that humans mostly use architecture to express their power, in every form of society, and some of my videos are about the failure of architecture, about the failure of a utopia and its turning into a dystopia.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Could you describe the three films, which accompany the three episodes?

NIKLAS: Ok. The first one, where you just said that there’s this zoom that’s described in the book. First of all it was a weird process to visualize this building because it should be mostly in the head of the audience, you know, you should imagine this building and it could have all different associations, but then I found the buildings at Ernst-Thälmann-Park, which is a socialist building park in former East Berlin. Ernst Thälmann was the leader of the Communist party during, I think, much of the Weimar Republic and his buildings are actually like a small version of what’s described in High-Rise. They were like small high-rises, but with a park around them and the buildings were on a hill so that everyone who was living in that building had a very good view, which is a kind of social idea. Obviously there are also bigger apartments on the very top and you had to be member of the socialist party to live in them, so there’s again this hypocrisy; I guess it’s a very hypocritical way to invent a social structure, when there’s power involved, anyway. I went first of all to the area where Paul’s version of High-Rise was supposed to take place, and Paul had already said that it’s close to this area where MTV and other big companies have started to have their flagship stores or their company buildings. I took pictures of one vast area where there was previously a club, and where now they’re building a big, multi-functional stadium. This is right where our imagined high-rise is, in the image in the first video. So what I did is I went to Ernst-Thälmann-Park and just stacked the buildings there on top of each other. This is obviously a metaphor: stacking these socialist buildings on top of each other to get a bigger idea of the whole thing.

PAUL: He did it almost like a plastic surgeon – from one house he makes a Tower of Babylon; it’s beautiful.

NIKLAS: It changes a lot of the content, I think. Regarding the technical aspects: at the beginning, the zoom, it’s a digital zoom, because the whole building itself is a Photoshop building. It’s combined with video in the background: the sky that’s shading from daylight into night is real; and also you see the skyline of Berlin, you see the TV tower in the background of the video, just to make the whole thing look a bit more real but also a bit like a comic. It looks like a fantasy building but it has this weird mixture of reality because it’s made from real images. The concept of the first part is that it begins in daylight, whilst in the radio play we’re listening to a TV show where the architect is talking about the building. He’s describing what you can see in the video; you look at my building, and listen to what Del Ponte says about his building. There are some parts where it’s really fitting and some others where it’s not fitting, which is good because then you have the idea that this is not the building: it’s just a placeholder for the building, in a way. When the first part of the audio play ends, it ends in the dark, at a party, and the first human dies. But this is happening at night, and so as the video image slowly zooms into the building, you end up at the entrance hall of the building, so metaphorically by the end of the first part you’re in the nightmare. It starts as a TV show, and in the end you’re in complete darkness, surrounded by the light of the windows – and you’re part of that building.

PAUL: Yeah, and the camera is right in front of the building, you know, in the entrance where the first dead person is thrown from the top floor…

NIKLAS: …out of the window…

PAUL: … that’s where the image ends…

NIKLAS: …yeah. And the people in the audio play are also looking out of the window, so they look down to the ground. This is where you find yourself at the end of the video.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

The second part was filmed in a building on the German island Rügen, a Nazi seaside resort. I think it’s the longest building in Europe: it’s 4.5 kilometers long, and it was the KDF building, which was built by the Nazis. It was part of the Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ programme. It was supposed to be a hotel for so-called ‘good Germans’. It was never finished; it actually ended up as a ruin, but then after WWII the GDR used it as an army barracks, where the army of the GDR was stationed. And then after the Wall came down it was used as a youth hostel, and it still is – they had stopped using it as a youth hostel, but I read recently in the news that it’s re-opened, which is such a weird idea. When you listen to the audio play, the second film corresponds to what is really happening in the building, whereas the first film is derived just from the structure of the audio play. The first part introduces us to the house and the people, whereas the second part is where everything is turning from a utopia into a dystopia, or from a funny audio play into a horror scenario. In the audio play when a new chapter starts, you hear the sound of the elevator. So, in the second film, the audience is actually stuck in this elevator that you hear all through the audio play. It’s actually spectating what’s happening in the building, and you can see how everything’s falling apart literally in the image, when there’s this very slow fade from the intact floor of the building, which was actually Photoshopped, to how the building in Rügen looks today. So it fades from a fictional image into a real image, whereas the audience is just stuck in the elevator, and through the elevator doors, they’re forced to watch the process of decay.

PAUL: There are several buildings in Prora-Rügen, that are exactly the same size and so on. Some are well-kept, because there’s the youth hostel inside, then there are others which are just ruins, at least on the inside, you have all these cables sticking out. I think Niklas broke into one of those…

NIKLAS: …yeah, I did break in, I brought an axe…

PAUL: …to film the ruin, and so you see in 50 minutes a fade from a nice long, intact, well-kept floor, to the same floor as a ruined chaos of cables. The video does nothing but that.

NIKLAS: But in fact I used three images, because the floors that are intact where the youth hostel was don’t look as nice as the high-rise should look before the revolution or the battle starts. So I photoshopped it; the very first image when the elevator opens in the video is pure photoshop. And then it goes to the real image: how the intact floors look today. And then I fade into the parts of the building that are completely falling into disrepair.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: And then the third film, which reminded me of bits of Chris Marker, or Tarkovsky…

NIKLAS: I was really happy when I read that, because both of these visionaries are like real heroes of mine. So thank you for that…

DAN: Well, it’s a very clear visual echo. Ballard himself is a real fan of Chris Marker.

NIKLAS: Yeah, I can totally believe that. So, the third part is filmed in Rechlin. It’s a very, very small village in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), so also former GDR. The houses you can see in the video were model houses for Germania, built by Albert Speer. They’re four or five-storeys high, and they look like miniatures of high-rises. You find them completely abandoned in the woods, and there are no signs for how to find them. I knew about the buildings from a documentary, so I went with a car, and I really had to search. There are no signs because there are still a lot of mines in that area from the war. What happened is that the Nazis used the buildings as test buildings, and they dropped bombs on them, because the buildings themselves were a mixture of a house where people were supposed to live and a bunker. They’re massive, made out of concrete. So that was their function; and now you find these four buildings in the middle of the wood, completely abandoned.

There’s a wild garden on top of the filmed ruin – and the end of the audio play is also taking place on the roof – this is where the women build a new society, a Matriarchat. But the video actually starts in the ruins of the building, whereas the audio play starts in this Circus Maximus arena, when Andy Lang is fighting against all the others and becomes the leader of the lower class by physical violence. Then the architect, del Ponte, comes downstairs and says, well, if you are a gladiator, I am Caesar. So there are all these references to ancient Rome; and these ruins in the film, if you look really close at them they have a similar kind of patina. But when you zoom out you see that they are part of a vision of another time in history. The building on Rügen and Speer’s buildings were part of a vision that didn’t include the human being. So for me they are an architectural metaphor of a society, or a reference to a model of society in which the human actually can’t survive.

PAUL: Because Niklas uses these extremely slow-motion fades, you look at the image, but you don’t see the change. It’s a very dramatic change, but it’s not obvious when you look at it in real-time. You feel that something changes, but you can’t really grasp it. It’s so perfidious, it’s subtle, and it’s absolutely not Hollywoodesque. It has a different kind of tension. Because the radio play is so dense – yet the videos give you the freedom to have your own image of the characters. At the same time the videos show the big process, what I talked of as the evolutionary cycle.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: When I made the videos, there was this question about how you do a video to a radio play and not turn the whole thing into a movie. When I first listened to the radio play I wrote down a lot of images, but they’re all just details. In the end there was the decision to in fact just show one image in each video that’s slowly changing. 55 minutes is quite a long time for a video – and I think if you just use one image, and look at it for a long time, it kind of disappears and gets replaced by other images. Warhol said that if you look at one image and you think it’s boring, just look at it for ten minutes and if it’s still boring, look at it for like 20 minutes and so on… In our case, you’re looking at one image for 55 minutes, and there’s a change happening, but you also have the audio that’s guiding you through a completely different world. I noticed that some people during the shows were closing their eyes; it was fun for me to watch their reaction when they opened their eyes again because all of a sudden the video was at a completely different point. I think some people thought, oh, it’s just one image, I don’t have to look at that, and then after a while they noticed that a lot has changed.

DAN: Absolutely. I actually rather enjoyed the fact that, during the first part, it got dark on the video as it was getting dark in Köln.

NIKLAS: Yeah, it was. I was really happy that the screen itself was not on the side of the Dom, because that would have been really tough competition…

Dan O’Hara, 2008

Hochhaus is currently touring Germany; the next dates will be on the 12 January 2008, Theater Mannheim, and in February 2008 at the Kampnagel Hamburg. Eventually it will be available to buy at Paul Plamper’s future outlet for radio plays, Hörpark.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Paul Plamper
+ Niklas Goldbach

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

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

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

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

The melt down has been going on for years now. NOW IT IS EVEN MORE DESPERATE, people showing how they feel in public because they just cannot get the help they need. Desperate people either harm themselves alone, in a quiet place, or they go into the public and sometimes kill the public along with themselves. Desperate times.

I have actually lost a friend who was a victim of similar circumstances, a bystander caught in someone else’s public meltdown, and now after this latest incident I just can’t help thinking of the equally desperate Duncan Christie in Ballard’s Kingdom Come. With his own mental health problems, and also falling through the cracks in the system, Christie is drawn to the geometry and noise of the suburban shopping centre, forced to make his point in as public a fashion as possible, entrapped in a no-win situation, coerced and cajoled by a system that will not protect him, but will ruthlessly use him to its own ends. In exploring the tension between the underclasses of consumerism — and the consumerism of health care, bought and sold, and afforded as a product — I think Ballard is dead on.

Critically, Kingdom Come is a woefully underrated book, even though within it are some sombre insights into the desperate times we are being plunged into.

TRIP: Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives
Manchester, 19-22 June 2008.

Call for Papers and Projects

* * Psychogeography *
* * Neogeography *
* * Deep topography *
* * Urban interventions *
* * Locative media *
* * Collaborative Mapping *

* * Between June 19 and 22, 2008, TRIP brings together artists, academics, movers, shakers, do-ers and dissenters in a unique event combining an interdisciplinary conference with a city-wide series of actions, exhibitions, and screenings. TRIP enables the previously separate worlds of theory and practice to interact, initiating new approaches and energies, and furthering techniques to take on and alter the physical environment.

* * Beginning as a reaction to the industrial revolution, the re-imagining of the city by romantics, bohemians, and avant-gardists evolved into a diverse range of strategies, practices and arguments, from the psychogeographic drift or derive to the artistic intervention. By the 1990s these were being utilised by artists, writers, activists, and historians, attempting to negotiate urban and rural space in the post-modern world. But practices developed in the twentieth century encounter a different world in the twenty first – a more observed and policed world on the one hand, a more corporate, globally-connected world on the other. Increasingly the body, social, individual and political, is the site of contradictory demands – the demands to consume versus the demands of control.

* * TRIP will be based at Manchester Metropolitan University, on the city’s main southerly corridor, Oxford Road. But we want events to take place throughout Manchester, in as wide a variety of spaces and venues as possible. Like many northern cities, Manchester is changing fast. Perhaps you want to critique the implications of “regeneration”, or perhaps you want to stimulate new ways of engaging with an increasingly consumerised environment. Maybe you’re passionate about the possibilities of inventive walking and drifting, or maybe you’re a performance artist aiming to change the energy of a public space. Wherever you’re coming from, TRIP wants to hear from you with your ideas.

* To submit a paper, you should send an abstract outlining your subject and the key points of your presentation.

* To submit an idea for an intervention, performance or a walk involving members of the public, please outline in one paragraph the aims and ideal locations for your project.

* To submit an idea for a gallery-based project, please outline in one paragraph the thinking behind your installation or work..

Please try to keep your paragraphs to a maximum of 200 words. And don’t forget your contact details.

Deadline for submissions: October 1st 2007.

Submissions should be emailed to:

* And for further information on festival announcements, walks, talks and events, please access http://trip2008.wordpress.com

The festival proceedings will be fully documented and recorded, and an edited volume of essays, art and photography will be published at a later date.

Review by Rick McGrath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pearson: “Still, everyone admired him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick McGrath

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

While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted at in the book’s second-last chapter, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. A version that replaces Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

In ‘Fuck Reagan’, ‘patients in terminal paresis’ are encouraged to devise the ‘optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan’. A ‘unique ontology of violence and disaster’ takes shape, as the ordinary public — the patients suffering from paresis; impaired movement, paralysis — reanimate by tearing down the lustre surrounding celebrity culture, the forcefield that has prevented the ‘little people’ from realising their full potential.

In Ballard’s piece, originally published in 1968, the cultural class system that has impaired, or paralysed, ordinary people with feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of a galaxy of radiant stars is destroyed in a savage, air-strike of the imagination:

Patients [placed] Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks… Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.”

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J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (165).
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This literally is SLASH fiction. Blood drips from it.

‘Fuck Reagan’ marks a distinct break from the rest of The Atrocity Exhibition, in which, despite the instability of the central character’s fantasies, there was a certain awe underlying his imaginative sorties into the world of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, John F Kennedy and so on — an awe that prevented him from making the final leap. It’s also present in the character Vaughan, in Crash, who yearns of killing Elizabeth Taylor in a celebrity car crash but ultimately ends up annihilating only himself, terminally unfulfilled (along with a busload of innocent bystanders who got in his way).

In ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, Ballard tested the wind, pushed the equation to its outer limits, predicted the rise of a new kind of ‘celebrity uncontaminated by actual achievement’ (as Ballard later termed the second wave of celebrity culture), a celebrity that causes resentment when ‘ordinary people’ finally have the means to dismantle the image, trying it on for themselves like a serial killer tries on a woman’s skin. There is no further truck with reification, with celebrity-deity because ordinary people have built a web 2.0 culture (or have been given the power, the means to build it) that will answer back and that will destroy those who seek to involve an unwilling public in their fantasies.

In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan… Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.”

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J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (168).
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But a web 2.0 culture doesn’t need to employ technology — doesn’t need the web, even — to do so. So, let’s use this term ‘web 2.0′ to denote a free-for-all that translates into the real world, an attitude that’s hardwired into the brain through constant exposure to the media landscape. As Ballard clearly outlines, the media colonisation of all available public and personal space means that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do but feed on the corpses…

Fame and celebrity were again on trial, as if being famous itself was an incitement to anger and revenge.”

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J.G. Ballard, Millennium People (2003).
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…spiraling down a black hole eating white stars, ported into Second Life, which lies just below the whirlpool, landmarked over there.

Paris Hilton is being consumed as we speak, just another star imploding. The savage public will not be placated by her talk of finding God in a jail cell. The savage public will not be wooed with her repentance and renunciation of vacuity. The savage public wants to feast on the corpse of empty celebrity. The savage public wants revenge. Like an anonymous would-be web 2.0 commenter leaving bile in the comments box of some blog that’s got too big for its boots, the savage public wants to break through the screen, wants to pierce the rump of unattainable stardom until blood oozes through the pores. So the savage public goes further, building its own ‘blog’ that becomes a destroying machine that becomes the body, drinking the blood and becoming infested with the knowledge that no one is better than ‘me’. The savage public wants to wank over serial killers and murderers, taking revenge for celebrity being attached to the cult of death. The savage public devours torture porn, bathes in the Bathory blood of actresses hogtied upside down. The savage public ensures that the most searched term leading to this very website is, in fact, the term ‘Princess Diana car crash’ and its multiple variations: ‘Di death fuck’; ‘sex Di death crash’; ‘fuck exhaust sex Di car Dodi died’.

The savage public wants to kill kill kill until there is nothing left, just a flat, smoking wasteland.

The savage public demands that torture porn be indistinguishable from snuff.

The savage public has no imagination and will feed off that corpse before turning on you, too.

Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?”

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J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (173).
——————————————————-

————————————————————————————————————–
…:: ATROCITY II: Notes Towards a Sequel
————————————————————————————————————–

+ ‘R.P.M’ by Chris Nakashima-Brown
+ Invisible Celebrity Literature
+ Gallery of the Absurd by ’14′
+ The Brangelina Exhibition
+ ‘Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales’ by Annik Hovac
+ ‘Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency’ by k-punk

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).
——————————————————————————————————

John writes: ‘It might just be because I’ve been getting ready for a conference on J. G. Ballard, but this article on the Ministry of Defence’s vision of the future certainly caught my eye’.

He goes on to highlight the most Ballardian passage, concluding ‘Shades of Millennium People, perhaps…’

Marxism

“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest”. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism”.

———————————————————————————————————-
‘Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future.’
Richard Norton-Taylor. 9/4/07.
———————————————————————————————————-

Rich, car-crashing idiot No. 2: Stefan Eriksson.

Over at The Wrong Advices, Dan writes, ‘After watching Eddie Griffin destroy a Ferrari Enzo I was reminded of some of the other times rich idiots have killed beautiful and expensive cars. I’ve put together a list of some of the more memorable crashes.’

My favourite is No. 2:

Car: Ferrari Enzo
Value: US $1.2 million
Idiot at the wheel: Stefan Eriksson – Former Gizmondo Exec
What happened: Crashed into a pole at 199 mph (320.61 km/h). Tried to
blame it on his imaginary friend Dietrich.”

Surely Vaughan’s shaman, Jimmy Dean, should be on this list…

[ via Spinopsys ]

————————————————————————————————————————

+ BUMPER HUMPER

Mechanic Chris DOES have a girlfriend — just one of the Sun’s charming photos.

Speaking of idiots and cars, Keith emailed to remind me of this news story, reported a few weeks back in the UK’s bastion of truth, the Sun newspaper, about a man who has sex with cars. Keith says: ‘Not sure whether it’s a joke or not. The guy sounds so goofy talking about his lust for cars that it makes you understand just how artful Ballard’s descriptions in Crash are.’

It’s *got* to be a joke:

MECHANIC Chris Donald loves his work — he has sex with CARS… “Some men like boobs and bums, but I much prefer curvy bodywork.”

Chris, 38, has a recognised psychological condition that makes him physically attracted to motors. He has had sex with more than 30 different models in 20 years — plus two motorboats and a pal’s JETSKI. Chris, who DOES have a girlfriend, confessed: “A nice car for me is a feast for the senses. It’s about smells, feelings and tastes. If I see a gorgeous Mercedes I know I’d love to jump into bed with it.”

His weird obsession mirrors that of electrician Karl Watkins, who The Sun revealed was jailed for having sex with pavements in Redditch, Worcs, in 1993.”

————————————————————————————————————————

+ PLEASURE SHOPPING

LEFT: Where pleasure is a way of life…

Look what’s just opened for business! The Metro-Centre, no less, billed as ‘the largest shopping mall in the south of the UK. Located at Brooklands, off the M25 near to Heathrow… This is the Metro-Centre where shopping is a pleasure and pleasure is a way of life.’

According to the Centre’s blog:

Want to try alternative types of medicine? Want to see what the healing power of crystal can do to your life? Then get over to the east wing on the second floor to The Crystal World. Featuring a wide variety of crystals, for both decorative and practical uses, The Crystal World could be your gateway to a new existence!”

The Metro-Centre’s only been open for a few weeks, but I’m predicting that pretty soon the blog is going to be reporting a secession that turns the Centre into an anomalous enclave, following a dark and mysterious ‘ad-noir’ campaign featuring a charismatic cable-TV host and a subsequent takeover by paramilitary goons…

The signs are already there: when you click on ‘map’, it says: ‘AT THE REQUEST OF THAMES VALLEY CID, THIS PAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED.’

————————————————————————————————————————

+ PUBLIC DISORDER AS ENTERTAINMENT

A Ballardian community?

For a taste of what you can expect when the Metro-Centre does kick off, Mountain*7 informs us that a ‘remarkable set of images, taken from a mini-riot that took place at the Gare du Nord in Paris on the 26th March’ has been uploaded to Flickr:

Apparently the whole thing kicked off after a passenger caught travelling without a ticket was arrested with ‘excessive force’ – there were 9 arrests made and some mild injuries (although the vending machine appears to have borne the brunt of the damage).

There’s a banality to the images somehow, as if the whole thing were a media set; and the sheer presence of so many cameras almost doubles the unreality of the event. We’re so inured to the idea of simulation now that the very mention of it seems superfluous, but this seems to have tipped over into something else, a Ballardian sense of community-through-violence, public disorder as entertainment.”

————————————————————————————————————————

+ SERRENIA NIGHTS

Serrenia: layer upon layer of invisible security.

Matteo emailed to direct me to Dan Hill’s mashup of Cocaine Nights and promotional material for the Serrenia project, the waterside development that ‘sits where the Red Sea meets the Eastern Sahara, mountain ranges to the west silhouetting the horizon, and beyond them the ancient city of Luxor and the timeless Nile.’

Dan goes on to say:

…can anything in literature be as bizarrely late-period Ballard as the actual Serrenia promo video and website? Is it even for real? Perhaps most of all, this section from the ‘PEACE OF MIND’ section of the website:

“Discreet, effective and efficient security is all part of the Serrenia experience. The security is there, all but invisible, building layer upon subtle layer. The very latest in high-technology protection, ‘laser’ fences, detect movement and 24-hour CCTV monitors constantly. Even after having been granted access to Serrenia through the main Sahl Hasheesh gate, visitors will still have to pass through one of the three main entry gates. The Hotel and ‘exclusive zone’ will be controlled by another security layer each with extra gates. Finally access to Palace Island is regulated by an additional layer of security and another gate. Experienced professionals, recruited from across the world, have given their expertise to create a secure haven, and to supply the most unobtrusive of safeguards, while all staff are rigorously vetted. Highly trained personnel are available at all times to offer support, though chances are you’ll never even know they are there, to guarantee your safety and freedom, so that you can enjoy the luxury of protection without feeling confined.”

One’s tempted to say “you couldn’t make it up” except that, essentially, Ballard already had.”

————————————————————————————————————————

+ THE CAR CRASH AS SEDUCTION TECHNIQUE

LEFT: Robert Maitland, eat your heart out.

And finally, via Rodcorp, we learn that Paul Thorp — a real-life Maitland from Ballard’s Concrete Island — is in the news again:

“Anyone who’s driven on the M62 between Manchester and Leeds will have seen the farm in the middle of the motorway and wondered: what’s it doing there? And is it, as most people believe, a monument to stubbornness?
…
Its sole occupant is Paul Thorp, a sheep farmer with just his dogs for company and 2,000 acres of land. Living 20 yards from the fast lane has its ups, downs – and near misses – as Paul reveals.

“It has its moments. We’ve had a few visitors over the fence. They’ve put a crash barrier up to stop ‘em, but before my time a wagon came through knocked the wall down landed on its side touching the garden wall. We’ve had plenty of accidents wagons and cars stuff coming through fence not that often but enough.”

…making Stott Hall Farm attractive to the opposite sex has proved difficult… Paul admits it can be a lonely place: “I guess you don’t want to be on your own all the time. It’s just a bit of a bleak place to bring somebody out in the wilds, all that traffic round you, and you’re a long way from anywhere – two miles from the nearest village. The postman only comes to the bottom of the hill and some days you won’t see anybody except those zipping past on the motorway – apart from people ringing you might not see anyone else to talk to.

“I just need someone who likes the outdoor life to have a breakdown outside and then come round!”

Paul, we have just the lady for you…

Suburban Badlands: the Mill Park aftermath. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

The system is self-regulating. It relies on our sense of civic responsibility. Without that, society would collapse. In fact, the collapse may even have begun.”

——————————————————————–
J.G. Ballard. Millennium People (2003; p. 104).
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On the morning of 2 January 2007, Melbourne woke to disturbing news. Under cover of night, a street in the northern suburb of Mill Park had been gripped by vigilante attacks. Cars had been torched and threats spray-painted onto vehicles and walls: ‘No more burnouts’; ‘You’re next’; ‘Tell your mates I know where they live’; ‘Any more and you will pay’; ‘We have had enough of this shit’. A series of news photos laid bare the currency of autogeddon, snapshots of vehicular expulsions littered about this quiet suburban enclave like the sigils of an initiatory consumerism. In the aftermath, residents told reporters of a long-standing hoon problem (‘hoon’ being Aussie for ‘hooligan’, with an automotive twist), with young petrol heads using the street for late-night drags and the obligatory, ultra-offensive round of tyre-squealing burn outs. Clearly, the burnings and graffito were the work of local vigilantes, fed up with their street being desecrated by these so-called hoons.

Autogeddon: Mill Park’s scorched-road policy. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

This was chilling stuff — apocalyptic reportage that bled car-crash fiction into reality. Flung headfirst into the uncanny valley, I was struck by the similarities with The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), the Peter Weir film set in the fictional Australian country town of Paris — it’s a Ballardian film of the first order. In this Parisian/Ballardian community, the locals manufacture road accidents, luring travellers to their death, or — if they survive — to a date with the town doctor, who performs medical experiments that turn accident victims into ‘veggies’: brain-damaged reflex mechanisms no longer capable of independent thought, only a group (re)action. Meanwhile, the crashed cars are scavenged for parts: old ladies polish carburettors as if they were prize jewels; the village idiot wears radiator emblems around his neck; and the mayor steals the best stereo systems for himself. In the background, the youth — Parisian hoons — rev their hotted-up cars in all-in drags, performing burnouts and generally disturbing the peace; this behaviour is tolerated by Parisians, with the hoons perceived as a kind of byproduct of the town’s peculiar economy.

However, when the hoons overstep the line by destroying the mayor’s property during a late-night drag, he orders the cars of the two gang leaders to be burned in a public display of humiliation, assisted by a vigilante squad caught up in forces its members don’t fully understand (they provide the support for the mayor’s reign, oiling the mechanism that powers the town’s closed-loop economy in support of vague rhetoric and empty civic pride).

‘You can’t burn a bloke’s fucken car!’. Still from The Cars that Ate Paris (1974; dir. Peter Weir).

That’s it — that’s the moment.

As we watch the burnt-out shells of cars smouldering in Paris’s main street, their drivers shackled and stripped of their metal skin, we feel the warning signals rippling out through the ocean of deep time, 33 years later, homing in on the events of Mill Park. The Cars that Ate Paris ends in civil war as the hoons take revenge, coming back bigger and badder than ever with lethal, spike-encrusted vehicles, destroying the town hall and other cornerstones of Parisian society in an orgy of tyre smoke and gear-crashing destruction.

After Mill Park, would Melbourne’s suburban badlands erupt in a similar fashion?

The catchment area of Heathrow extends for at least ten miles to its south and west, a zone of motorway intersections, dual carriageways, science parks, marinas and industrial estates, watched by police CCTV speed-check cameras… I welcome the transience, alienation and discontinuities, and its unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability and the instant impulse.”

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J.G. Ballard. ‘The Ultimate Departure Lounge’ (1997).
—————————————————————————————-

An ‘unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability and the instant impulse’ — here, Ballard could be describing the events of Mill Park, a similar catchment area dominated by the vectors of speed (the suburb is bifurcated by Plenty Rd, an enormous dual carriageway) and ‘the instant impulse’. According to Wikipedia, ‘Mill Park is not short of fast food restaurants, with McDonalds, Hungry Jacks, KFC and Pizza Hut all within proximity of one another’. That’s a strange aspect to highlight, but one that the author obviously felt was significant enough to include.

Noble Park Maccas, the scars of autogeddon clearly visible in the foreground (photo: Simon Sellars).

As I was attempting to digest the significance of the Mill Park attacks — as hard to swallow and keep down as a Big Mac — another outlying region, Noble Park, erupted in violence. One Friday night, in the shadow of the Noble Park McDonalds (or Maccas), the meeting point for what is by all accounts Melbourne’s biggest illegal drag meet, the newspapers told us that 1500 spectators lined the Princes Highway (‘some with babies in prams’), watching rice rockets and muscle cars put the pedal to the metal for a few hundred metres, culminating in smoking orgiastic burnouts for the crowds:

Friday’s crowd was incensed at a police cordon and the use of anti-hoon laws to confiscate cars, and rampaged through a business at the intersection, looting and trashing. The McDonald’s restaurant, which has no official link to the drag racing but which is viewed by those attending as its spiritual home, was not trashed.”

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Michelle Coleman. ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ‘ (2007).
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When the police — just 50 of them, severely undermanned and disorganised — arrived and attempted to break up this scene, they found they were no match for the huge crowd, which, recognising its superior numbers, went in hard, driving the cops back…and then some. Presumably hopped up on a fuel-injected perfume of burning rubber, hoons and spectators alike went on the rampage, destroying the nearby Blockbuster video store and attacking traffic signals. Remarkably, the Noble Park Maccas was saved from harm, watching over the protagonists like a benevolent dictator (a worrying detail that could just about supply the basis for an entire separate essay).

‘No money, no grudging; pure fun’ — ‘car enthusiast’ Matt gives it some. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

Everyone knows Noble means Noble Park Maccas,” says Matt, 28, who has been attending illegal street drag racing at the corner of the Princes Highway and Elonera Road, Noble Park, for six years.

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Coleman. ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ‘ (2007).
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Just as The Cars that Ate Paris predicted, the hoons did return after Mill Park — bigger and badder than ever, trashing suburbia, overwhelming the cops and utterly destroying civic sensibilities, fuelled on by media coverage and trapped in a feedback loop of violent one-upmanship — an ‘autopian’, consumptive, synchronous economy. Like the Metro-Centre in Ballard’s Kingdom Come, the suburb of Noble Park was turned into a temporary autonomous zone, where mob rules and the game of ‘hypertrangsression’ ensures chaotic perpetual motion.

Benjamin Noys summarises the process:

Ballard’s recent work…puts into play the necessity for an apocalyptic or catastrophic violence to exceed the regulated violence of contemporary culture…to literally blow apart the limits of the existing order. Again the only way to exceed licensed transgression is through an out-bidding by another hypertransgression. This process recalls Baudrillard’s analysis of potlatch, the gift exchange of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, as a process of ‘continual higher bidding in exchange’… It also conforms to Baudrillard’s description of the terrorist act as ‘at the same time a model of simulation, a micro-model flashing with a minimally real event and a maximal echo chamber’… It belongs to the order of simulation, as it will be spectacular and an object of media interest…”

—————————————————————————————————
Benjamin Noys. ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard‘ (2006).
————————————————————————————————–

Maximally echoing unto infinity, mobile-phone footage of the riot was uploaded to YouTube, sparking a fresh orgy of outrage in the mediascape. More vigilante attacks were threatened. Police threatened to impound the cars of all known hoons. The Noble Park perpetrators were promised they would be hunted down. TV current-affairs programs licked at the aftermath like a rabid dog. And dob-in-a-hoon telephone hotlines were set up, building on the post-9/11 hysteria that Australia has capitulated to so completely, a continuation of a process we succumbed to a long time ago.

It’s a process that maintains a disturbing convergence with car culture. According to Catherine Simpson, Australia has ‘a cultural fascination with road tolls; they are often detailed on the nightly news, as if they somehow signify how “we” are doing against the “enemy”…the rhetoric of warfare was often employed to curb rising road toll statistics. In 1946, the Australian Automobile Association declared…that traffic accidents: “constitute an enemy which takes almost as great a toll of Australia’s already sparse population as did the enemy nations in the second world war”.’

This notion of a faceless enemy, drilled into the collective psyche through popular culture, helps to explain why Australia has been so thoroughly aligned with US foreign policy and the War on Terror — this country is the perfect petri dish for injecting paranoia about the ‘faceless, unknown threat’ of terrorism. But today, as Bush and his war rapidly loses support, it’s becoming clear that Australian Prime Minister John Howard can’t back down for fear of admitting the last five years of unblinking US-aligned foreign policy were built on less-than-transparent foundations. So the machinery of anti-terrorism must continue to churn, as Howard insists on maintaining Australian troops in Iraq; meanwhile, back home, we have miserably failed to find suicide bombers under every bed.

And so we have the ludicrous image of ‘elite terrorism police’ stationed at Melbourne airport: unable to find actual examples of the menace we’ve been so primed to receive, they impotently issue parking tickets instead. As the narrator of Ballard’s Crash observes, while stuck in the frustration of a traffic jam going nowhere fast, ‘The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause’ (p. 151).

Beware the water cops (photo: Sandy Scheltema; from the Age newspaper).

But wait, there’s more: as Australia continues to be beset by drought, terrorist culture gives rise to water vigilantes, with citizens afraid of sneak attacks by members of their community for visibly watering their lawns. And all of it leads to the latest example: these dob-in-a-hoon hotlines, encouraging us to pick up the phone and anonymously ‘dob’ in young offenders in a kind of state-sanctioned vigilantism (‘dobbing’ is a very Australian term for turning someone in, lagging, grassing, ratting, informing).

I keep returning to Ballard’s ‘immense, motionless pause’ — as good a way as any to describe the bureaucratic Moebius strip that is the ‘Mill Park solution’. Mill Park’s local council has known about the hoon problem for some time: as the newspaper reports made clear, residents had been complaining long and hard — for the last 10 years, in fact. You’d think the obvious solution would be to install speed humps (‘road cushions’) — simple, effective, and safe. But that’s not the Australian way. When residents of a hoon-plagued street in another suburb, Dandenong South, dug up the road and installed their own speed humps, the council removed them within a day, without replacing them with road cushions of their own (and fining the residents to boot!) leaving the problem to fester still.

(Man, it’s hot in here…)

For 10 years Mill Park residents also tried to go through the correct channels, petitioning the council for ‘traffic calming’ measures including the fabled speed humps (‘traffic calming’ has been defined as the goal ‘of reducing vehicle speeds, improving safety, and enhancing quality of life’). The council responded with one of the most ludicrous civic pacification schemes in memory. As the minutes for June 2006 outline, this involved a multi-stage ‘Traffic Safety Education Program’, consisting firstly of a ‘mail-out to local residents advising of community concerns regarding excessive traffic speeds and inappropriate driver behaviour in their street, [reminding] them of their responsibility to drive safely and within the speed limit.’

A mail-out — that’ll teach ‘em.

(We’re at boiling point, now).

To enforce the suburban 50km/h speed limit, the second stage involved ‘the placement of THINK 50 50km/h bin stickers on rubbish bins.’

Stickers on bins — those hoons won’t know what hit ‘em.

(Too late: it’s all over. Mill Park bursts into flames).

The hoons return, bigger and badder than ever before. Still from The Cars that Ate Paris (dir. Peter Weir, 1974).

Faced with this sequence of events, you have to wonder if Mill Park is being used as some kind of exurban laboratory. Perhaps you could even identify the stages in the chemical process: sell cars as indestructible and sexy (how many recent car ads show vehicles morphing into Transformer-style robots? It’s a whole new genre in advertising); transform a suburb from isolated enclave to chaotic catchment area via inadequate traffic management, so that it becomes overrun by drivers and their indestructible attitudes (according to the council minutes, the streets off Plenty Rd have been increasingly used as ‘rat runs’ by motorists wanting to escape the traffic lights and interminable traffic jams of that monstrous thoroughfare); ignore residents’ complaints when the rats overrun it, or soft-soap them with Band-Aid solutions; sit back and watch the fireworks finally explode; move in with ‘solutions’ that promote divisiveness, mistrust and a ‘soft fascism’ perhaps best articulated by Ballard in Kingdom Come:

‘No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want. Your job is to set the stage and create the climate. You steer them by sensing their mood. Think of a herd of wildebeest on the African plain. They decide where they want to go.’

Cruise chuckled… ‘How do I control them, impose some kind of focus? The whole thing could start to go mad.’

‘Mad? Good. Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no one is really looking’.”

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J.G. Ballard. Kingdom Come (2006; p. 146).
————————————————————————

Just like Paris, just like the satellite suburbs in Kingdom Come, Mill Park is a self-regulating system: auto-violence fuels the economy; the economy is auto-violence. Inescapably, through blatant inaction and a covert escalation of hostilities, the Mill Park councillors lit up the cars in Mill Park just as surely as the mayor of Paris did in Peter Weir’s parallel film world (where the mayor didn’t actually light the torch, but remained a malevolent presence in the background, pulling the strings).

To what end we can only speculate, but drip-feeding an approved ‘terrorist culture’ into local politics in response to the anarchic ‘horror’ of vigilantism seems to be an end result. By dobbing in a hoon, we have one more compelling reason to mistrust each other, to see ‘how we are doing against the enemy’ — safely, anonymously, and with the cloak of government sanctions to protect us.

There’s one final, Bizarro-world parallel: the image of the dobber picking up the phone to inform on the evil hoon (who, of course, is a product of the system). It’s a mirror of Paris’s mayor, in the film’s denouement, encouraging the previously ineffectual protagonist, Arthur (crippled by road trauma early on, but intoxicated by the thrill of violence in the end), to kill the leader of the hoons, who no longer serves a purpose save as a very public sacrifice.

As the Melbourne-based Fossil blog notes:

The Howard Government’s national security hotline (DOB IN A TERRORIST, 1800 123 400) received 42,000 calls in its first two years, between December 2002 and December 2004. Clearly there are a lot more dobbers than terrorists. In 2005-06, following the “support the system that supports you’’ campaign, Centrelink [the national organisation responsible for social-security payments] received nearly 120,000 calls to its dob-in-a-dole bludger line, alleging overpayments. About 2 per cent were genuine ['dole bludger' is Aussie slang for someone cheating the welfare system].

This is by no means an exhaustive list but if you wanted to you could reach for the phone right now and dob in: a hoon; a drug dealer; a drug cheat (sport); a water cheat; a “dodgy seafood retailer’’ – yes really; a litterer; a rubbish dumper; a wife-beater; an illegal immigrant; a “scammer’’; a dodgy cab; a dodgy taxpayer; a burglar; a backyard mechanic; a cockfighter; a dogfighter; and a software pirate, RRrrrrrrrrrr.

That’s a lot of dobbin’.”

Indeed it is.

Up against that critical social function, traffic calming — ‘enhancing the quality of life’, in other words — just doesn’t cut it in this day and age.

Simon Sellars.

————————————————————————————————
..:: REFERENCES
Ballard, J.G. (1973) Crash.
————- (1997) ‘The Ultimate Departure Lounge’.
————- (2003) Millennium People.
————- (2006) Kingdom Come.

City of Whittlesea (2006) ‘Ordinary Council Minutes’, June.

Coleman, Michelle (2007) ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ’. The Age, January 16.

Crawford, Carly (2007) ‘Dob-in-a-hoon hotline’. Herald-Sun, January 7.

Crawford, Carly and Cameron, Kellie (2007) ‘Mobs go on wild rampage’. Herald-Sun, January 14.

Elder, John (2007) ‘Vigilantes emerge in times of fear’. The Age, January 21.

Fossil blog (2007) ‘Are you a dobber?’. Fossil, March 14.

Inguanzo, Shaun (2007) ‘New humps for hoons’. Star News Group, 28 February.

Noys, Benjamin (2006). ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’. Ícone 9: 29-38.

Oakes, Dan (2007) ‘Car burns as hoon street anger bubbles over’. The Age, January 3.

Russell, Mark (2007). ‘Elite cops hand out parking tickets’. The Age, January 14.

Simpson, Catherine (2006) ‘Antipodean Automobility and Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road’. Australian Humanities Review, Issue 39 – 40.

Weekes, Peter. ‘Sign of the Times — Water Vigilantes’. The Age, January 14.

Dig deep. Re-acquainting myself with these quotes, it’s interesting to note that Kingdom Come‘s theme — ‘soft fascism’ transmitted via the virus of consumerism — was well on the way to incubation:

Eden-Olympia’s great defect is that there’s no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems. … Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any Messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.”

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J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes (2000).
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What a shame it is, then, that this vision — so lauded back then — has palled in the media’s eye, if the reviews of KC are anything to go by.

Meanwhile, out there in the badlands, ‘affluenza’ attacks healthy hosts and remains unchecked, while the antidote is neutered, shuttered up and driven to the perimeter by barbarians.

Abraham Zapruder was a tourist in Dealey Plaza whose amateur cine-film captured the President’s tragic death. The Warren Commission concluded that frame 210 recorded the first rifle shot, which wounded Kennedy in the neck, and that frame 313 recorded the fatal head wound. I forget the significance of frame 230.

The Warren Commission’s Report is a remarkable document, especially if considered as a work of fiction (which many experts deem it largely to be). The chapters covering the exact geometric relationships between the cardboard boxes on the seventh floor of the Book Depository (a tour de force in the style of Robbe-Grillet), the bullet trajectories and speed of the Presidential limo, and the bizarre chapter titles — ‘The Subsequent Bullet That Hit,’ ‘The Curtain Rod Story,’ ‘The Long and Bulky Package’ — together suggest a type of obsessional fiction that links science and pornography.”

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J.G. Ballard. Chapter 2: “The University of Death” (annotations).
The Atrocity Exhibition.
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Sold! For $3 million, to the barechested man in the engine-coolant-and-semen-stained white coat…

Although Chris Nakashima-Brown alerted us a week ago to the news that “the *actual* JFK assassination shooter’s perch window from the 6th floor of the Texas
School Book Depository was up for sale on eBay”, I neglected to post about it, presumably because I was too preoccupied with false idols and guru-spotting.

No matter. Geoff over at BLDGBLOG has come up with a typically imaginative response to the news that the perch has just been sold for over $3 million:

…the auctioning off of JFK’s fatal window also opens up the possibility that we could chainsaw, chisel, or otherwise reclaim – i.e. steal – historically important bits of architecture, removing them from their original contexts and exhibiting them elsewhere. The balcony over which Michael Jackson dangled his baby in Berlin; the terrace from which Juliet addressed Romeo; the windows through which administrators were defenestrated in Prague.

Perhaps we could even re-assemble all these into a complete, if eclectic and quite controversial, new building – add the JFK window as the coup de grâce – and you’ve got a 21st century version of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London.

But, of course, archaeology is full of such acts of structural burglary. Whole temples and friezes and doorways and rooms have been removed and transported elsewhere. Just ask Lord Elgin – or, for that matter, ask the Getty. In light of all this, then, are we witnessing some new Lord Elgin of the 21st century, raised on the novels of J.G. Ballard, as he or she begins a new quest to collect pieces of architectural morbidity?

The sale of JFK’s window would thus be the opening salvo in this death-obsessed archaeology of tomorrow.”

———————————————————–
..:: FURTHER INFO

More Ballard for your buck:

Oswald was the starter.

From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already under way.
…
The starting point was the Texas Book Depository, where all bets were placed on the Presidential race. Kennedy was an unpopular contestant with the Dallas crowd, many of whom showed outright hostility. The deplorable incident familiar to us all is one example.

The course ran downhill from the Book Depository, below an overpass, then on to the Parkland Hospital and from there to Love Air Field. It is one of the most hazardous courses in downhill motor racing, second only to the Sarajevo track discontinued in 1914.”

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J.G. Ballard. Chapter 15: “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race”. The Atrocity Exhibition.
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“Believe me, the next revolution is going to be about parking.” (J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.)

It’s becoming harder to keep up with the swelling tsunami of Ballardian world events. First we had to come to terms with the hidden meaning behind the Lisa Nowak story and Australia’s recent flag-waving menace. Then we had to wait for the latent malevolence underlying Australia’s water vigilantes to show its full face. And now we must digest the recent spate of letter bombs in the UK aimed at traffic-regulation targets (speed-camera providers; the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority, and so on).

As a reader, Gordon, emailed last week, “I’m sure I can’t be the first to mention it, but the more I hear on the news about the bombing of DVLA offices, the more I think this could be the start of the sort of middle-class uprising that Ballard writes about in so many of his novels. If they take over an airport next then I know exactly who to blame!”

Class is of course a key to the secret history — in Ballardian terms — of this particular story, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out as the investigation unfolds.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that:

An angry motorist could well be responsible for the latest attacks, according to “Captain Gatso”, the campaigner responsible for attacks on speed cameras and who operates under a pseudonym. “What we are looking at now is a war on the motorist,” said the man who represents Motorists Against Detection (Mad). “And the motorist is fighting back,” he said. “It’s payback time.” Captain Gatso’s group claim to have carried out 1,000 attacks on speed cameras, causing more than £29m damage.”

Bizarrely, the “Gatso” effect has spread to Australia, according to the Age newspaper:

Police believe a disgruntled motorist is responsible for shooting two red-light cameras and will examine recent offenders at the Melbourne intersection where four lenses were damaged. A witness has told police he saw two men with a pistol shooting at the fixed cameras… Police searched for the men overnight using dogs and helicopters, but failed to find them…

Acting Sgt Martin said, “It’s extremely disturbing for this sort of thing to be happening out in the suburbs.” … Police said the witness heard two explosions, like gunshots, then saw two men loitering on the side of the road. “He then stayed and watched … and one of the males approached the camera, put his right hand up and pointed at the camera and another two, what he said were like shots, rang out.”

I love Acting Sgt Martin’s incredulous tone: “How could this happen in the suburbs?”, he effectively says.

Clearly he hasn’t read Kingdom Come, where it’s in huge letters on the back cover: THE SUBURBS DREAM OF VIOLENCE.

Here in Victoria we’re undergoing a severe drought; heavy water restrictions are in force and things are projected to get much worse.

A sign of the times is the appearance of “water vigilantes”, as reported in the Age newspaper:

MARGARET Norriss is living in fear. The retired teacher is so scared of the emergence of water vigilantes that she doesn’t dare hose her front garden, even though she has been using a rainwater tank for the past nine years. “The whole thing is turning the community against one another,” Ms Norriss told The Sunday Age. “It’s becoming like Big Brother and I’m starting to feel very uncomfortable.”
…
She is not alone. Garden envy is rife and threatening to spill over to open hostility as the State Government asks the community to anonymously “dob in a water cheat”. Monash University academic David Dunstan fears the growing hysteria about water is threatening our sense of community as “neighbour is pitted against neighbour”.
…
Like an increasing number of Melburnians, Ms Norriss is terrified of being wrongly accused of breaking the new water restrictions. Terrified at the thought of a knock on the door from the “water police”. She has hung a sign on her front fence declaring only non-town water is in use. But that hasn’t stopped the abuse and glares of people as they slow to pass her Northcote home.”

Anyone who’s read Ballard’s Drought will surely notice the chilling parallel with the book’s Reverend Johnstone and his tub-thumping militia. Of Johnstone, Ballard writes:

By a strange logic he seemed to believe that the battle against the drought, like that against evil itself, was the local responsibility of every community and private individual throughout the land, and that a strong element of rivalry was to be encouraged between the contestants, brother set against brother, in order to keep the battle joined.
…
Johnstone brushed aside the money with the barrel of the shot-gun. ‘We take no cash for water here, son. You can’t buy off the droughts of this world, you have to fight them. You should have stayed where you were, in your own home.’ “

As we swelter down under, I’ll keep you informed as to whether the remainder of the Australian summer follows the prophecy outlined in the rest of Ballard’s book.

OPENING LINE:
“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

From the opening scene of Laing tucking into his canine dinner — the spoils of urban warfare — to the final ascent of the high-rise, this is a brilliantly original work that has affected anarchists, surrealists and psychologists alike.

The quotes on the back of my 1993 Flamingo edition tell the story:

J.G. Ballard wants to argue that high-rise flats incite maniacal aggression and perversion in ordinary people. High-Rise is about a 40-storey apartment block, and how from innocent beginnings it reduces people to murder, incest and above all a passionate love for chaos … a gripping read, particularly if you like your thrills chilly, bloody and with claims to social relevance.”

Time Out

“Harsh and ingenious … High-Rise is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind.”

Martin Amis, New Statesman

A modern fable — a commentary on the hideous possibilities of advanced technology and the rat-like nature of trapped human beings. The writing s cool, the observation exact, the idea bold and well-developed; everything seems to demand attention and analysis”.

Financial Times

Rick McGrath has onlined an in-depth dissection of the novel:

A night patrol creeps along a dark hallway past a barricade of desks; a flash of white birds leap into the air like a fluttering flag of surrender; a dog lies drowned in the middle of a community pool… welcome to High-Rise, J.G. Ballard’s deeply subversive study of a society in transformation.

J.G. Ballard has often told interviewers that his characters all seek a kind of highly personal psychic salvation, and that they will, if necessary, create their own self-defining mythologies and pursue them to their furthest logical ends, no matter how illogical it seems, or what the cost. In High-Rise, Ballard has created an isolated environment for the close study of the deconstruction of an ultra-modern apartment block into a new, devolved society based on the premise that you are what your cave is. Readers looking for obsessive, outlandish social mayhem will not be disappointed: High-Rise has 40 stories of shock corridor ahead.

The premise is fascinating: just after the last property in a 1,000-suite high-rise is occupied, the first little signs of social change begin to become public. A party is in progress. A wine bottle crashes and smashes all over a resident’s balcony. Soon crazed, drunken, mob-mentality parties are breaking out all over the building, and now we’re deeply into the action, led in shocked wonder as Ballard brilliantly describes the metamorphosis of group psychopathological desire into a new kind of urban social model.”

Rick McGrath. ‘Deconstructing High-Rise’.

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“25 August, 1988. Where to start?”

This novella is just 87 pages long. Ballard calls it a ‘whydunit’ (rather than a ‘whodunit’), and it’s as uncanny as that implies. The shadow of Columbine hangs over this work (or, rather, vice versa).

The murders happened shortly after 8 o’clock on the morning of 25 June, 1988. Media speculation was rife on the so-called ‘Pangbourne Massacre’, but no-one knew why 32 adult residents of an exclusive housing development had been brutally slain and their children sbducted. In the face of total bafflement and continuing public outrage, the police called in Dr Richard Greville, the Met’s Deputy Psychiatric Adviser. But as Greville sifts the evidence and decides to follow new lines of enquiry he is drawn to a conclusion as appalling as the crime itself…

From the Arrow 1989 edition.

A chilling moral fable for our time.”
William French, Globe & Mail

“The writing is elegant, taut and economical; the story is gripping.”
Sunday Times

“An austere brilliance of style and composition.”
Sydney Morning Herald

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

Indeed. I’m about a third of the way through Kingdom Come and I’m finding it far more localised and inward looking than previous Ballard. I’m wondering how the theme of football fascism will translate to other territories… Probably really well. Racist attacks sprung on immigrant communities by clockwork sporting mobs happen here in Australia, too. The difference being that it’s more likely to be surfers than football fans who are the reactionary nationalists (as happened on Sydney’s Cronulla beach last December).

And we have identikit Bentall Centres (the Centre being the inspiration for the foreboding Metro-Centre in Kingdom Come).

As usual, JGB has his finger on the pulse, but as far as the football fascism goes, isn’t he some way behind John King who was identfying nationalist, mobile-phone-linked mobs in his ‘Football Factory’ trilogy? Of course, Kingdom Come rapidly springs off into other directions, so perhaps this is a minor point.

In any case, I hope that with this book we see more reviews of JGB from outside England…having said that, here’s an absorbing review from M. John Harrison, published in the Times, which raises some very interesting points about the ‘Ballardian template’: “we … understand with a shock that it is the author who feels bored and trapped, not the characters”.

OPENING LINE:
“A small revolution was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed.”

From the 2003 Flamingo edition:

Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London’s fringe protest movements, falling in with a shadowy group based in the comfortable Thames-side estate of Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, the group aims to rouse the docile middle classes to anger and violence, to freem them from both the self-imposed burdens of civic responsibility and the trappings of a consumer society — private schools, foreign nannies, health insurance and overpriced housing. Markham, seeking the truth behind Laura’s death, is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control. Every certainty in his life is questioned as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital…

Compelling, disturbing and typically acute, Millennium People is J.G. Ballard’s most remarkable novel yet. Its shockingly plausible vision of a society in collapse is proof that this most original and influential of authors is at the peak of his powers.”

Millennium People is witty, life-affirming, sharp as a blade — and highly topical, continuing to resonate into the 21st century. K-punk captured the tenor precisely:

Gould is an elegant and eloquent salesman of the Deleuze-Guattari ‘line of abolition’, the Fascist drive to destruction which is ultimately a drive towards self-destruction. Ballard, who, to his credit has always refused to endorse facile moralizing, would no doubt object to that characterization, since to in any way condemn or censure Gould would be to confirm the very securocratic values he seeks to undermine.

However, the most compelling aspect of Millennium People, politically speaking, is not the in many ways familiar asignifying violence, but its PUNK THEORY OF CLASS REVOLT.”

k-punk. ‘What are the politics of boredom?’

This is hard-core. From now on ordering an olive ciabatta is a political act.”

J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.

..:: 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

OPENING LINE:
“The suburbs dream of violence.”

From the 2006 Fourth Estate edition:

Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel, is driving out to Brooklands, a motorway town on the A25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the middle of this apparently peaceful town, when a deranged mental patient opened fire on a crowd of shoppers. When the main suspect is released without charge thanks to the dubious testimony of self-styled pillars of the community — including Julia Goodwin, the doctor who treated his father on his deathbed — Richard suspects that there is more to his father’s death than meets the eye, a more sinister element lurking behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall.

Determined to unravel the mystery, Richard soon realises that the Metro-Centre, with its round-the-clock cable channel and sports clubs, lies at the very heart of his father’s death. Consumerism rules the lives of everyone in the motorway towns and feeds the cravings of this bored community with its desperate need for something new, whatever the costs. Riots frequently terrorise the streets, immigrant communities are set upon by roving bands of hooligans and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies. Gradually, Richard finds himself drawn into this world, caught up in the workings of the mall, exposed to the insides of the consumer dream, and starts upon dismantling this wayward vision his advertising career helped to found…

In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to middle England, reflecting an unsettling image of suburbia and revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.”

The negative notices this remarkable vision have received don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Ballard’s a man who admits he doesn’t read novels, instead devouring ‘invisible literature’: marginalia, copywriting, medical journals, psychiatric reports, Ikea catalogues, cereal boxes. He’s influenced by Freud, film noir, science fiction and Surrealist paintings; film, more than anything. To compare him with some literary type who practices the art of ‘tight plotting’ and ‘well-rounded protagonists’ is woefully inadequate. Reviewing KC in the Telegraph, David Robson wrote: ‘The plotting is clumsy … and the violence, integral to the whole design, belongs to the world of comic-strips’. Well, yes. Precisely. Honestly, do we still live in an age where popular culture is considered second-rate to the almighty ‘novel’? Funnily enough, I’m put in mind of my 78-year-old father, who refuses to watch The Simpsons because ‘cartoons are for kids’.

At least we have theorist Steven Shaviro, who has written the most insightful review of Kingdom Come to date, refreshingly free of the restraints of commercial media:

Kingdom Come has so far only been published in the UK, not the US. And it has gotten mostly negative reviews — even from speculative writers like Ursula LeGuin and M. John Harrison, who ought to know better. The book has been criticized for the fact that its plot and characters aren’t slick, catchy, and ‘well-constructed’ enough. But of course these are the wrong standards by which to judge Ballard. He writes genre fiction as social theory — and he remains, at age 76, one of the most acute social theorists that we have. His insights could not be communicated in the form of the artfully structured literary novel. His seeming repetitiveness, his clumsy prosaicness, and his insistence on a kind of pop-culture (so-called) ‘kitsch’ are necessary tools of insight. In a thoroughly Modernist way, his form coincides with his themes; though, as an anatomist of our “postmodern” condition, his forms/themes are such as the classic Modernists could never have imagined.”

Steven Shaviro. ‘Kingdom Come’.

Rick McGrath has also written a provocative review, from his own perspective as an ex-ad-man:

But what form does a non-message take? For Pearson, that’s easy: “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.”

Regardless of all the novel’s ranting about consumerism and violence and fascism, I find this marketing insight perhaps the most chilling prediction of Kingdom Come. Instinctive advertising – a direct message to the irrational, the purely emotional. It’s about using psychopathology, after all. It’s a chilling thought not because it could be a campaign as Ballard imagines it, but because it is a campaign which is currently being successfully employed by, oh, advertising for the fashion industry, Hollywood, political parties.

Rick McGrath. ‘Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Ads Be Run…’

And Ballardian contributor Pippa Tandy offers the following thoughts:

JGB is not Alan Sillitoe. There is little point in reading KC for direct equivalences to social conditions. Although he writes of the effects of consumerism, shopping malls and the obsession with sport, Ballard is not a realist writer. Although he makes reference to the notorious DuPont as the benefactor of a research wing of a mental asylum, (97) and uses as a chapter heading the expression ‘Exit Strategies’, has his protagonist speak of himself as only being good at ‘warming the slippers of late capitalism’, (9) and make other references to political and social realities of the past and present, this is not a direct socially realistic account of society. KC reiterates images that appear from his earliest work, images that are coded references to his earlier writing but which have another function. As in his other writing, they are a register of the psychic state of his society. It is not a question of whether his characters behave as ‘real’ people behave; KC is rather another myth of the near future, except that the near future is now on top of us. (And has been for a while, hardly Ballard’s fault!) Remember Ballard never felt like he needed to check the realist accuracy of his descriptions. You will recall that The Rockford Files and Kojak informed his understanding of America, a Thames Valley gravel pit supplies the lineaments of Cape Canaveral, and so on.

KC begins in the typical liminal setting of the Heathrow motorways, with a protagonist narrator who finds himself drawn into a maze of concrete and paranoia, who backs away from the reflected attenuation in his own mirrored face, who limps through the broken mallscape on a bandaged foot, a black comedy in which motorways and runways intersect, fugitives hide themselves as shop mannequins, the beach of a shopping mall echoes the beach of a nuclear test site, and a deracinated psychiatrist and mock Lemmy Caution move among the crowd. Ballard would probably not like to admit it, but he is doing something similar to Godard in Alphaville. He is using the materials of his time (shopping malls, sporting crowds, consumerism) as latent conditions. That is why it all seems a bit wrong when we try to match it all up. Like his other writing, this novel is Ballard’s attempt to bring vision to the present, to create, like the detonation in the Metro-Centre, a space in which a section of space-time had been erased, exposing a deep flaw in our collective dream.� (113-4)

And, just another point, for fun. Is not the description of the dead Cruise being wheeled around as a kind of totem figure, surrounded by grieving worshippers, very reminiscent of Mr Kurtz on his stretcher in Heart of Darkness?”

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

45-Hour Delay: Nonstop Plight
Passengers on an Air India flight endure hours on the tarmac, a mini- revolt and more. Oh, the memories!

By Jennifer Oldham, Times Staff Writer

On Tuesday, hundreds of Air India passengers tried again, settling into a different jumbo jet with “Your Palace in the Sky” scrolled in red script near the tail. This time, one of the engines wouldn’t start. For about five hours, travelers sat in the sweltering plane. Flight attendants locked up the drinks. Some passengers staged a mini revolt.

Finally, passengers were taken off the plane and bused to a hotel, arriving at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday. They overwhelmed the front desk, and some did not get to bed until 4 a.m.

The weary travelers returned to LAX later Wednesday morning for their third attempt, a flight set to depart at 1 p.m. It was pushed back. It was moved up. And finally, around 4:30 p.m., they took off, bound for Frankfurt, Germany, and New Delhi.

All in all, after two nights with little sleep, endless waits in line and three scheduled flights, their ordeal stretched to a 45-hour delay.

“It’s been a nightmare,” said Jaswinder Toor, a self-employed contractor from Modesto, as he waited in the Tom Bradley International Terminal on Wednesday.

Through it all, an engineer, a psychologist, a man recovering from open-heart surgery, several college professors, an aspiring model and “a Western Master of Eastern Wisdom” got to know each other on a first-name basis.

Some didn’t make it to important lectures. Others lost precious vacation days. And a few worried they would miss once-in-a-lifetime family events.

“I want to be at that wedding, otherwise I’ll get very mad,” said Gursharan Toor, 16, as he stood in line with his family Wednesday morning, a Red Bull in one hand and a fruit juice in the other. “I only have one sister.”

The high school junior’s journey started early Monday when he, his brother Jaswinder, his brother’s wife and their 6-month-old son drove from their home in Modesto to San Francisco to get a visa for the baby.

After a seven-hour drive to LAX, they boarded Air India Flight 136 to New Delhi. As the plane took off, Gursharan said, it shook after a tire burst, startling passengers.

The Boeing 747-400 flew over the ocean and circled, dumped fuel and then returned for a bumpy emergency landing.

The landing gear dug into the runway, leaving a 7,000-foot-long field of debris that took 40 employees hours to clean up.

That night in a hotel, the teenager and his family turned on the news to see footage of their plane landing amid a shower of sparks.

“We’re lucky everyone is safe, thank God,” Gursharan said.

Airport officials said the pilots made a wise choice to take off, explaining that, if they had aborted, they might not have had enough runway to stop the heavy, fully fueled aircraft.

Jaswinder Toor tried to get the family on a different airline but was told that the next available seats were not until Jan. 15. His sister’s wedding is Jan. 8.

On Tuesday, the Toors returned to LAX, loaded with 10 pieces of luggage and wedding presents, to try again.

Flight 136 pushed back from the gate at 8:35 p.m. — 2 1/2 hours late.

As the jet approached the runway, the crew realized that one of the four engines was malfunctioning.

Revolting High Rises (registration required)

‘The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame for both. His designs inspired many of the suburbs where the riots of October and November began. In fact, he inspired the very practice of housing the urban poor by building up instead of out. Soaring apartments, he thought, would finally give sunlight and fresh air to city laborers, who had been trapped in narrow and fetid back streets since the dawn of urbanization. But high-rise apartments mixed badly with something poor communities generate in profusion: groups of young, armed, desperate males. Anyone who could control the elevator bank (and, when that became too terrifying to use, the graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold hundreds of families ransom.
‘Le Corbusier called houses “machines for living.” France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation. In theory, the cause of this alienation is some mix of the buildings themselves and the way they’re joined to the city. But in practice, the most effective urban renewal has tended to focus on the buildings. It focuses on the buildings by razing them.’

The full article is here. (registration required)

TITLE: HIGH-RISE (Feature Film – in Development)
SYNOPSIS: From J.G. Ballard, the author of the best sellers, COCAINE NIGHTS and EMPIRE OF THE SUN, comes an unsettling and unforgettable tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control. The tower’s affluent tenants are bent on an orgy of destruction; cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on "enemy floors" and the once luxurious amenities become an arena for technological mayhem. The rule of law gives way to the rule of the jungle as life crumbles around them.
PRODUCERS: Jeremy Thomas, Gabriella Martinelli
DIRECTOR: Vincenzo Natali
PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Summer 2006
STATUS: Canadian/UK Co-Production
SOURCE: Capri Films and The Recorded Picture Company

Are we learning to love the high life? Graffiti-daubed hellholes or design classics for swanky urban living? Barry Didcock considers society’s continuing edifice complex

“…there is a growing band for whom the high-rise is a covetable design classic, offering the prospect of loft-style living with great views but without the hefty price tag. They’re the ones who will whitewash every wall they haven’t already knocked down and then try to sand the floors – the sort of people who know the difference between Le Creuset and Le Corbusier.
No matter which camp you fall into, it’s hard to disagree on one thing: as property prices continue to rise and urban space becomes ever more precious, there are serious issues concerning the way our cities are developing and where we house the people who fill them.
…
JG Ballard used the multi-storey building as a metaphor for a lawless society in his nightmarish 1975 novel, High-Rise, set in a luxury tower block. The previous year The Towering Inferno hit cinema screens all over the world, based on two novels, The Tower by Richard Martin Stern and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N Scortia.
…”