+ THORACIC DROP: < Deposit
> news appropriate to this site.
+ AUTOGEDDON: Subscribe to Ballardian & receive automatic email updates
Lie Down with the Beast
Author: Simon Sellars • Dec 18th, 2006 •Category: Ballardosphere, fashion, space relics
OK, I’m a few days late with this, but I just wanted to acknowledge my Super Snout, FJ Torres, who alerted me last week to the presence of Peter Lindbergh’s Future of Fashion spread in this month’s Harper’s Bazaar (FJ previously tipped me off about Steven Meisel’s Terror Porn antics).
Ballard once wrote that “sex times technology equals the future”, and this spread builds an entire world using that formula: Lindbergh distils a nostalgia for a retro-future that never was (apparently all the rage right now), sprinkling it like stardust over these photos, forever delaying orgasm in an imminence that never arrives, man, machine and starlet collapsed into the eternal present.
The dream is forever out of reach: to “unlock the door, embrace the flames, lie down with this beast in a world beyond time”…
FJ: “This picture in particular is just TOO much. Like a still from a film version of ‘Memories of the Space Age’…”
She was intent now only on the search for her father, confident that he would soon be returning from the tideways of space. At night the trajectories were ever lower, tracks of charged particles that soared across the forest. She had almost ceased to eat, and Mallory was glad that once her father arrived she would at last give up her flying. Then the two of them would leave together”.
————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
————————————————————————-
…:: LINKS
+ Peter Lindbergh’s Future of Fashion spread
Author:
Simon Sellars
Find all posts by
Simon Sellars
Newer: Godless, Sodomite Lit »
Can’t get over the fact that all that 60s hardware has more ‘futurity’ (as the Cyberpunks used to say) and sex appeal than any current space tech…
Maybe the future is long gone.
Damn.