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I seem to be to agree with most of the thinkings and opinions and this post is no exception.

Thank you to get a good web site and I hope you hold up the good perform. If you do I will continue to browse it.

Use a good day.

I went back to the exhibition last week with Sheila, who was particularly taken by Hiorn’s copper sulphate engines, and by McCarthy’s mechanical pig. But others, such as Jeff Koons and the mushroom sculptures, were rather inexplicable … at least to us!

Pedantic point – the text on the ‘New Novel’ is from Chemical & Engineering News, not C&I.

I loved his anecdote about JGB’s friend, Dr Christopher Evans (1931-1979):

“Shortly after first reading ‘Crash’ in the early 1970s, I’d seen Dr Chris Evans give a talk at an SF convention. It was quite a revelation: here in the flesh was Vaughan in all his feral erotic intensity. Evans prowled the stage just oozing sexuality. He wore a black biker’s jacket and a blue denim shirt open to the midriff. You might have got into a car with the Doctor, but you wouldn’t have accompanied him up a dark alley. Of his talk, I can’t remember anything, just his physicality remains in my mind…”

Which SF convention might that have been, I wonder? Perhaps “Mancon” in 1976? Or something earlier?

Evans’s “oozing sexuality” had diminished by the time I met him, at the Brighton Worldcon in August 1979; but that, as it turned out, was just a couple of months before his death. He was sun-tanned, but noticeably thin. But having seen him occasionally on television over the years prior to that, I can well believe that in the early-to-mid 1970s he was as Dave Britton describes. Without being homosexually inclined, no doubt JGB responded to that sexuality in the man, as well as to his other qualities.

Funnily enough, I’ve been thinking a lot about Dr Chris Evans this past couple of days — I’ve been re-reading his book _The Mighty Micro_ (1979) for the first time in over 30 years (remarkably prescient in some respects, less so in others); and I’ve also been listening to his voice on old tapes (definitely public-school, and not a hint of Welsh), having dug out my 1970s and 1980s audio-tapes in search of something else to do with Ballard.

I’ve also been skimming through Brian Aldiss’s _Shape of Further Things_ again, which, in part, is a book about Dr Chris Evans. Here’s a 1969-style vision of the coming Internet:

“Fifteen minutes into Thursday, 9th January 1969. I’ve been walking up and down my drive by the light of a half-moon… My location: a little village called Southmoor, in Berkshire, England. … Friends of ours have just left. Dr Christopher Evans and his wife Nancy. They came down from Twickenham for drinks, dinner, and talk. … He was saying how much and how fast computers have developed. … Chris said, ‘At the National Physical Laboratory where I work, I’m a subscriber to Telecomp, which links me to a computer a few miles away. You could get the G.P.O. to put you on the circuit too, if you wanted, although it’s pretty costly as yet. You get a separate telephone and a switch-box, and can just dial yourself on to the computer. It comes through on a sort of telex machine not much bigger than an ordinary typewriter, and talks to you in almost ordinary English. This is the area where some of the major advances are now coming… Soon you’ll be able to talk to computers practically man-to-man. You must come over and play with this computer some time.’ ”

(Aldiss, _The Shape of Further Things_, Faber, 1970, p13-14, 18-19.)

Wow: computers — talking “man-to-man”! This would have been exactly the sort of imagination-stimulating stuff that Evans fed to Ballard too, in the late 1960s, early 1970s.

David.

Tomorrow I must spend the time to fully appreciate the embedded audios and videos, especially the Proby stuff.

And like you, I think “Reverbstorm” is the best recording that Savoy made …

“There’s a notorious — to us — moment in the TV interview which Ballard gave to Jeremy Isaacs on Face to Face where he says that his writing career took the imaginative route it had because of his childhood in Shanghai, and he doubted if he would have become a writer if he had grown up in a suburb of Manchester.”

You know why Ballard specified “a suburb of Manchester,” don’t you? It was because that’s where his parents were living immediately before they sailed for Shanghai in 1929. JGB’s father, a Lancashire man, worked for a large Manchester cotton-printing company, who sent him out to help run their subsidiary in Shanghai shortly after he got married. If James Ballard senior had not accepted that job, then the boy JGB may well have grown up in a suburb of Manchester. That was a “life not lived” for him — like his later alternate-self fantasies of being a doctor, a psychiatrist, or an RAF H-bomber pilot.

As it was, JGB did see a little of Manchester after his father returned to England in 1950. (JGB and his mother and sister had returned at the end of 1945.) His dad bought a house in the Manchester area, where he and his wife (and daughter) must have lived for at least a few years before moving south. In Iain Sinclair’s BFI “Crash” book, JGB is quoted as saying: “I remember watching TV with my parents in Manchester in something like 1951. There was only one channel. We looked at a screen the size of a lightbulb.”

Now, there was no TV available in the Manchester area until the opening of the BBC’s Holme Moss transmitter, up on the high moors (near where Brady and Hindley later buried their victims), in October 1951 — so my best guess is that JGB’s parents bought their first TV set soon after that, and that JGB may have first watched it with them on a visit circa Christmas 1951. He was a student at Queen Mary College, University of London, during the academic year 1951-1952, so he could only have been visiting during vacation time…

Maybe the glimpse(s) of suburban Manchester he got in the early 1950s were quite enough to feed his fantasies of that “provincial” might-have-been life.

David.

I well remember the JGB interview on the BBC2’s Face to Face, probably round about the time i first read Empire of the Sun, fascinated that such an outwardly conventional man should have such an imagination.

Loved the ambiguous comment on JGB’s influence on Will Self.

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I am currently reading his biography of Anna Kavan — energised by learning that she visited her mother in Monterey, Constantia, Cape Town, in the late 1940s … just down the road from me.

Congrats to all. A copy of Lord Horror is no mean prize.

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I’m trying to find an English-subtitled version of the Portg. film adaptation of “Low Flying Aircraft.” As well, I’m hoping to find, for research purposes, copies of the BBC films 13 to Centaurus, Minus 1 and Home. If anyone can help, please reply privately to chris.cokinos@usu.edu

Thanks much.

I’m against that, too – let’s leave it at that, eh? None of the people I follow on Twitter indulge in such nonsense, and most use it as a tool for work and/or creativity.

And bloody hell, 30 years since I first put finger to touch-sensitive keyboard. Though I’m slightly younger than Simon, I think.

I am a mild user of Twitter (@HalifaxSlasher), though I mostly started it just as a way of keeping tabs on a few chums who, to varying degrees, ceased communicating by other media. It’s an occasionally diverting vehicle for mimbling and spleen-venting, I suppose. Can’t get that excited about it either way.

It might be worth a more serious discussion sometime, when we can both summon more than 140 characters at a time.

Otherwise, tish. And keep up the good work.

“I use Twitter and have found it to be a surprising place/thing. Beyond mundane alerts of sandwich eating and celeb watching are communities growing, dividing, merging and all the time, pulsing information like waves.

Information that catches me, takes me with it to other communities that temporarily gather about the subject before moving on to the next. What does this achieve and is it even meant to achieve anything, is debated and largely depends on what Twitter has washed over you personally.

For me… I (along with one of those temporary communities that gathered about the recent London protests), alerted ‘Tweeting’ news teams (mainstream press) to parts of the protest that were in trouble. I watched the evidence on the news that evening.

Another wave from within this particular Twitter-stream lead to a clustering of those who wanted truth about Ian Tomlinson who died after an encounter with the police at the protests. This continued Twitter-chatter kept the story fresh and did not allow for the lies that were officially released at the time, to be believed.

I follow links if they look enlightening or amusing and I follow people who I encounter along the way – opening up my information base to other voices that broaden my view. I get to see the same world events unfold through the eyes of all those who are watching too and sharing their perspective in real-time. Fascinating.

Time consuming though… sometimes unplugging is vital.

Will it sell books? Unsure.

January 9, 2010 1:16 PM”

………………………………………………….

I don’t know where Twitter is heading or if it has definable direction but it is certainly fascinating to watch evolve.

Namaste,
Tina Louise
@tinalouiseUK

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“The giant shining face of Jim Ballard stared out at us, like some deity critically surveying his assembled congregation. Below this over-sized icon Nic Clear swayed back and forth on his feet, at times falling into a reverent chant as he picked up on some core Ballardian doctrine: the high priest behind his technological altar.”

Full post here.

http://audioh.com/projects/InnerSpaceMemorial.html

It’s interesting to contemplate Ballard, a writer inspired by painters, inspiring musicians. If it was not for music, as an American I maybe would have never discovered Ballard. It was basically the Buggles that turned me on to Ballard. Trevor Horn (who wrote the Buggles’ lyrics) has stated that Ballad is his favorite author, in fact, hints of Ballard’s prose are all over both Buggles albums, a lot of Ballard’s pet words show up such as terminal, chromium, half track, diesel, and the subject matter is Ballardian as well, especially on The Age of Plastic which is a concept album about a not too distant dystopian future. Consider the song I Love You Miss Robot, is it really such a jump from sex with a car fender to sex with a robot? Of course Video Killed the Radio Star was inspired in part by The Sound Sweep, but so is the tune Astroboy and the Proles on Parade, where we find the lyric “radio stations their faders in dust/all their transmitters are crumbling with rust.” (you may remember the derelict radio station from The Sound Sweep) On the second Buggles album Adventures in Modern Recording is the song Vermilion Sands, which mentions sand yachts and thermal rollers, has a car crash sandwiched in between parts of the song, and ends with a quirky dance hall beat which may well represent the fox trot Ballard describes as playing on a phonograph in the opening scene of Say Goodbye to The Wind. (Horn was at one point bass player for the house band at the Hammersmith Odeon.) It’s too bad we didn’t get to hear more from Trevor Horn the musician, he has a lot more talent than a lot of the acts he has produced!