Ballardian

The infamous Texas Book Depository window, and the fatal frame from the Zapruder JFK assassination film.

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.”

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..:: 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.
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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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