‘The Crashman’: An Experiment in Applied Internet Ballardianism
Author: Crashman • Apr 8th, 2008 •Category: David Cronenberg, Freud, Lead Story, Michael Moorcock, WWII, YouTube, censorship, death of affect, features, film, flying, humour, media landscape, music, psychopathology, speed & violence, sport, war
“The Crashman”: An Experiment in Applied Internet Ballardianism.
by the Crashman.
ABOVE: ‘White Bird’ by the Crashman. ‘XB-70, Tu-144: White Bird Must Fly, or she will crash’.
From the moment Blake crashes his stolen aircraft into the Thames, the unlimited dream company takes over and the town of Shepperton is transformed into an apocalyptic kingdom of desire and stunning imagination ruled over by Blake’s messianic figure. Tropical flora and fauna appear; pan-sexual celebrations occur regularly; and in a final climax of liberation, the townspeople learn to fly.
From the cover blurb to The Unlimited Dream Company, J.G. Ballard, 1979 (Triad/Panther edition, 1985).
Perreau: You once said “Nothing has any sense except in terms of ephemeral airplane culture”. Motorways, airplanes, shopping centres… What is the link between these things? What do humans do?
Ballard: They take planes and fly around, like the great soaring birds who endlessly cross and recross the ocean. Like the albatross, we are looking for our soul. Tourism is a rehearsal for death.
From Yann Perreau’s interview with J.G. Ballard.
As a stripling, I had the immense good fortune to stumble across the short stories of J.G. Ballard in the pulp science fiction magazines of the day: IF, F&SF, Analog. These prompted me to get hold of his early novels: The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Crystal World. I was seduced by the subtle brilliance of Ballard’s work, by the total absence of worked-to-death SF themes, by the air of detached sophistication, overwhelming to a callow adolescent like me.
When Mr Ballard turned his back on “conventional SF” and pioneered the British New Wave with Michael Moorcock, I was as excited as anyone. His work opened up a relentless, terrifyingly limitless voyage into the libido, the id, the savage psychopathology that lies hidden in every ordinary man and woman, the possibility of any strange thing. Reading Ballard as an adolescent changed my entire view of the world, certainly of what was called “Science Fiction”.
In the early 70s a fellow fan handed me a copy of Crash. It was an utterly stunning experience. Crash ruined my taste for anything but the finest SF, and I was haunted for years by visions of Vaughan’s peculiar hobbies, those bizarrely twisted, almost unheard-of modes of human sexuality spelled out inexorably by the book. Now nothing could satisfy me as fully as Mr Ballard’s experiments with what the human psyche was really capable of, laying out unthinkable sexual and psychological grotesqueries in his trademark elegant, gentlemanly, spare and penetrating prose. His writing remade my intellectual world.
I gulped down his later novels, each more thought-provoking than the last, reveling in the astounding but visibly true events reported in the daily news as much as in his work. I found little to criticize, least of all his unflinching view of the profound yet subtle changes imposed by modern civilization on a thinking organism many millions of years old, an organism evolved under very different conditions than prevail today.
I searched for similar oracles, those who could further light the shattered-glass-strewn, arc-lit motorways we would soon be endlessly traveling. The Cronenberg movie
ABOVE: ‘Helicopter Opera’ by the Crashman. ‘Helicopters crash to soaring opera by Kimera’.
I developed a desire to put forth my own tribute to Ballard’s work and somehow to carry forward the concepts that had so fascinated and changed me. I am no writer of any skill, and the idea of writing something “derivative of” or “inspired by” the genius of the Oracle of Shepperton was repellent to me. It could not fail to be anything but the crudest of imitations. So, to contribute to the Ballardian universe and its inhabitants, I latched onto the themes expressed in Crash, and since Mr Ballard’s novels acknowledged little or no boundaries, neither would I. I felt I could somehow take the themes of Crash even further, in different media if necessary. I thought about the event that had more or less inspired Crash: Mr Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars as art, with the death and destruction latent in these twisted, crashed vehicles unleashing something that had always been hidden in the minds of their viewers. I wanted to do that.
In my teens I acquired a pilot’s licence, for sport and for the opportunity to master dangerous technology. But I was also drawn to plane crashes, to air crashes of any type, crashes at air exhibitions, transport accidents, airliners, sport planes, military fighters. They attracted me in the same way as Vaughan, who could not pass a motor accident without slowing to view and, if possible, photograph the result. From childhood I collected every book, press clipping and photograph I could find that dealt with aviation accidents and their strange and often grotesque aftermaths. To this day I have valises bulging with old magazine and newspaper clippings of long-forgotten air crashes.
Famous air tragedies have become iconic for me: so much human anguish dealt out by a crack in a pressurized Comet window joint, by the decision of the KLM captain at Tenerife to advance the throttles of his huge 747 while another loaded 747 on the same runway ahead of him lay hidden in the fog. By the peculiarly unforgiving nature of mechanical flight, midair collisions against all odds, the inexplicable crash deaths of highly experienced pilots from unexpected causes, of men and women who had spent thousands of hours at the controls. As Ballard’s work implies, we are at the mercy of our own technology.
I began to understand what it was that never fails to fascinate the public about aviation: the CRASH. A massive, newsworthy and completely public display of flying vehicular violence always raises the psychological stakes on the table, and is faithful to the essential Ballardian spirit. In the film The Great Waldo Pepper the barnstorming protagonist asks, “Why do people come to airshows?” The answer he is given is: “People don’t come to airshows to watch planes fly. They come to watch a man die.” Few psychoanalysts would disagree.
But I have also never met a pilot who can resist reading a crash report or viewing a film of one. We learn from them, “there but for the grace of God go I” — but like a car accident on the motorways that now define our civilization, no one can look away. We are all spectators at this destructive end-stage of our grotesquely dehumanizing civilization. Eventually it will become boring, as Mr Ballard has predicted our future as a civilization to be.
ABOVE: ‘Kraftwerk Crashes’ by the Crashman. ‘Topnotch crashing, all technical styles’.
Added to that, I was also fascinated by Ballard’s stint in the RAF and the flying symbolism in his books. Again and again he has teased us with aviation and its dangers, so akin to the dangers of the motorway. There’s the protagonist aviator in Super-Cannes with his crash-injured knee and his banner-towing girlfriend. There are the accounts in The Kindness of Women of military training in powerful RAF Harvards in Saskatchewan; of the ceaseless activity at the huge airports that always seem to be at the nexus of those fascinating and deadly motorways; of the forever-lost Turkish aviator trainee and his crashed Harvard, inverted for eternity in an unnamed Canadian lake, its form just visible, slowly disappearing under green algae as Ballard flew over it. And of the bold and virile American Mustang over Shanghai, herald of liberation and of a change in Ballard’s life as profound as that triggered by the Japanese occupation, itself announced by graceful formations of Zeros and Mitsubishi bombers over the soon-to-be-destroyed Shanghai of the 1930s.
So here was my chance to sit at the Ballardian table and place my own dish on its menu. Given my aviation background, and my desire to evoke the spirit of Crash, what could be more appropriate than the sight of a sudden and unexpected crash, preferably of a large airliner, its great silver phallus shattering in an ultra-high-speed orgasm of violent, spasmodic disintegration, uncontrollably spewing the shocked, wandering gametes of its ambulatory survivors and the ragged chunks of human flesh still full of their own unique DNA? This is epistemology, the very question of identity itself: “Who are we?” “Who were you?”. And what could be more Ballardian? No one ever emerges from an air crash unchanged at the deepest levels, even if they do survive.
ABOVE: ‘Crash Right In’ by the Crashman. ‘Baby let your hair hang down…’
The raw materials for the experiment were already available. I found numerous websites devoted solely to air accidents, those rare films where a motion-picture camera has recorded the unfolding of the crash, the cries and shouts of the survivors and onlookers, the stunned silence of the injured and the unending silent rage of the dead, lives with a whole trajectory changed forever in the intersection with violent arcs of shatteringly powerful, aluminium turbine-powered technology. Right away these suggested TV commercials of traveling death and terrifying impacts rather than beaches and sun, films of agonizingly public yet intensely personal disasters of which the Zapruder Kennedy motorcade film was an early harbinger.
I collected these films, poring over dread experiences frozen forever in time. Again, I recalled Ballard’s exhibition, where the mere presence of the crashed vehicles in a public art-space had touched and unleashed the id of the viewers, to the point where the audience began to interact unpredictably and destructively with these static displays of demolished technology. Somehow, Ballard’s work had touched something that was always there, but rarely expressed in public.
I began to edit the films to music, making my own choices and juxtapositions, the goal being to emerge with a collection of short videos that had been extracted from reality, yet would evoke in the viewer the same types of emotions and insights unleashed in Mr Ballard’s work. I used a neo-Ballardian pastiche technique to edit them: no plot, no dialogue with the viewer, nothing but crash after crash, and the result emerged as a video collage of horror, dismay, and death, Ballardianism expressed in an entirely new set of technological media.
ABOVE: ‘Turning Japanese’ by the Crashman. ‘I think I’m turning Japanese…’
The films in their original state were often silent, sometimes monochromatic and flickering with age, and sometimes modern color video, the soundtrack replete with the noise of impact and the cries of onlookers. But music dictated an important “feel” to the videos, echoing and amplifying the visual crash itself, lending it layers of additional meaning (although I often left in the cries of spectators and survivors, the better to immerse the viewer in the event). I found that the visual material of crashing aircraft lent itself readily to many kinds of musical background. Repeated slow-motion test crashes of old airliners called for music evoking the eventual futility of life. Exciting airshow passes and flaming collisions called for equally exciting, pounding rock ‘n’ roll. Surviving, parachuting pilots had their luck accompanied with notes of musical grace. Antique crashes evoked songs from their own black-and-white era. Uniquely elegant aircraft crashes called for matching beauty in the music.
At first I kept these short videos to myself. I felt the general public would see them as merely morbid, while the aviation community, of which I remained a part, would probably react even more negatively. Then I began to post them on websites devoted to bizarre and unpleasant events. After I had made a few of the videos public, a collective audience began to slowly emerge. I began to receive feedback and criticism, sometimes constructive, often laudatory, and sometimes merely abusive. But these people were accustomed to horrible sights and events already, like a doctor or air crash investigator. How would a random, general audience feel and what would they say? I took the next step: in 2006 I uploaded most of the videos to YouTube.
I expected to be excoriated by this wider, larger general public as a ghoul, an exploiter of the suffering of others, and as it happened the word ’sick’ was freely applied to the videos as well as to myself. I considered this a compliment, as it mirrored the initial response to Crash (’This author is beyond psychiatric help: do not publish’, according to the publisher’s reader). But, and I had expected this too, neo-Ballardians began to show themselves, finding subtle excitements and even strange beauty in the videos, that uneasy, disquieting splendour inherent in the slow-motion breakup of a speeding aircraft. Negative commenters, meanwhile, would often complain that the music was not to their taste, ignorant of the maxim “de gustibus non est disputandum”.
While I got my share of abuse as a psychopathic air crash ghoul and poor chooser of soundtrack music, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: not one of the persons commenting who had an authentic aviation background found them less than fascinating, and the vast majority of them found the videos praiseworthy. They admitted they were fascinated and horrified at the same time, feelings made familiar by the very real possibility of such crashes happening to them. They had been fatally intrigued. As one of my sharpest critics admitted, even he couldn’t look away from the screen. The material was simply too visually powerful. I had touched something, and I hoped it was close to what Mr Ballard had touched in the readers of his novels and in the viewers of his crashed-car art installation.
I continued to expose my unpromoted, unadvertised work, with all its unfettered techno-pornography of aviation violence. Within a little more than a year my videos had been seen by well over a million people on YouTube alone. The experiment was working on a large stage now.
ABOVE: ‘Proud and Glorious’ by the Crashman. ‘Death and glory in the air…’
The viewers seemed to get the intended spirit of these odd video creations right away. Others had already begun making fascinating crash-collage videos of auto accidents, and my work was seen as kicking the violence stakes up a notch, because, I suppose, of the relative rarity of plane crash films and the indisputably brutal violence inherent in their nature. Famous airliner crashes, the air conflicts of WWII, the pathetic mishaps of general aviation and the unintended accidents at public airshows and aerial exhibitions interested the vast majority of viewers.
I found that nationalism played a large part in most of the negative reactions. Russians, for example, would complain about videos devoted to their own airshow crashes. My video of the incomparably horrible Lviv airshow accident in 2002 showed shredded bodies on the runways, yet how could a video faithfully recording the original event ever be justifiably censored? No one can even see these videos unless they seek them out…
Once a contingent of Britons forced YouTube to take my collage of helicopter crash films offline, by bombarding them with complaints that it showed a completely non-explicit but fatal crash of one of their own country’s helicopters. Again I adopted a Ballardian stance: here it is, make of it what you will. View the videos or not, as you choose. To the extent I needed one, I pleaded the aesthetic defense of reality, of psychological and factual truth-telling — and a strong one it is.
It’s interesting to note that since I began posting in 2005, quite a few others have begun to do the same, editing various aviation-accident and plane crash videos to music and posting the result. The experiment has gone “viral” — a novel subgenre is emerging on YouTube and many other sites devoted to odd videos.
On a personal level, I consider this experiment an enormous success, comparable to the feelings of an author or filmmaker who knows that literally millions of people have chosen to view their work. On the Ballardian level, as a public psychological experiment in Applied Ballardianism, it merely proves what we already knew: that Mr Ballard’s unique visions are as powerful when translated into other media as they are in his work itself.
We know that Mr Ballard does not use the internet, but his partner, Claire, does. If by chance she runs across this project someday and shows it to him, I can only hope he will accept this experiment as it was intended: as a sincere tribute to the man and his work.
I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
J.G. Ballard, introduction to Crash, 1973.
The Crashman. Copyright 2008, Crashman Productions.
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Can’t think of much to say, but this was a really interesting post. I’ve watched a few of the videos.. find the music a bit twee in most cases (but I guess this is what makes the videos yours), but still pretty interesting to see the responses and so forth.
This blog post was particularly well written though. The Crashman needs a regular blog if he doesn’t already have one
And here was me thinking that people were fascinated by aviation because it would transport them to new climes round the world. How naive. Crash fascination is clearly a part of the equation here, but only part. And any mentality that thinks that people are only interested in aviation because of crashes is a naive and deluded and disturbed one projecting its own Rorschach blood-death orgasm pathologies onto the wider public.
People’s real-life deaths as entertainment. Sigh. Frightening and passe and disturbing and disgusting; choose a negative adjective. Even Ballard himself is now confused and creeped out by Crash and how confused and angry he was when he wrote it. I wonder if he would be truly apply to have inspired such a sociopathic experiment. I have my doubts.
But I would agree about this piece being well-written. For what that’s worth. And I hope I never get into a plane with this guy at the controls!
G.
Addendumb: I meant to say ‘truly happy’ instead of ‘apply’.
G.
LOL! Thank you for the informative comments, gentlemen! Here, I suppose, are the best and most-informed Ballardian critics available. Thank you for your interesting comments. And yes indeed, Mr. Rae and Mr. Cooper, the music was always controversial (and always a de gustibus matter), and yes, the visual material itself is a kind of distasteful violent technopornography. And I certainly cannot pretend to speak for the Oracle of Shepperton, but I still feel (especially after watching the Youtube Ballardian channel and that excellent movie starring Mr. Ballard himself, musing on the feelings evoked in him by watching the automobile safety-test crashes. ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAll1HZi_Tc ) that he would understand the ideas involved here…
I think it is clear that the same psychosexual and unconsciously violence-loving (Freudian death wish, anyone?) vicious id-forces are work here within a viewer’s brain as well as in the development of our technological world. Observe how air crashes immediately seize the attention of the daily news on TV, and the public at large, although they represent only a minute part of the various modes of technological harm done us - in America, the yearly automobile crash-death rate approaches that of the entire Vietnam war, yet we are oddly blind to this… You are cetrainly right to have your doubts about what Mr. Ballard’s own opinions might be, Mr. Rae - but I can find the same aviation-as -technodeath themes continuing though much of this work, long after *Crash* was written in 1973.
What surprised me about the experiment was that 1.3 million people chose to view these videos on YouTube alone… and few criticized them as sraarkly and clearly as you did, in calling them “People’s real-life deaths as entertainment. Sigh. Frightening and passe and disturbing and disgusting; choose a negative adjective….” Correct. I agree. Why should this be so? Why do people slow down at auto accident-scenes to view the details of the crash? Why were these violent, shattering aviation-death technopornographic films so popular? Why, indeed, do people go to airshows where pilots perform frighteningly dangerous maneuvers? I am searching for the answers myself.
YouTube only tells me that as of today,1,373,802 persons have chosen to view these videos and this YouTube channel now has 347 subscribers - in about the last 18 months alone. I myself wonder why people would even look at this stuff - but look at it they did, in droves of hundreds of thousands. Why would anyone read or view the Cronenberg movie of *Crash*? This experiment produced confusing data, that can be read on many levels… why would anyone look at an art exhibit that consisted of the smashed vehicles involved in auto crashes, with mannequins representing the victims inside…? Indeed. But it certainly touched something in the psyches of the viewers.
As for the accompanying music, what I tried to choose was music the public itself has chosen as popular at various times. Fitting or not? You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Perhaps it is “rather twee” for that reason, although I confess I had to look that term up - I have seen the word only in the novels of American pop-journalist Tom Wolfe, and the British writer Paul Theroux. And yes, most of the most critical remarks in comments under these YouTube posts had to do with the choice of music - my suggestion to those folks was that they were certainly free to turn off the soundtrack and watch them to the accompaniment of more appropriate music, according to their own tastes….
Because I think the fact is, there IS no music appropriate to awful tragedies like these, unless it would be an eternal slow requiem for the souls of Mankind and our too-fascinated media immersion in spine-chillingly dangerous technology and architecture . And as I said above “This is epistemology, a very question of identity itself: “Who are we?” “Who were you?”.”
I’ll leave you with the videos I myself specifically dedicated to Mr. Ballard, and as always, remain interested in the opinions - positive or negative- of all my fellow Ballardians. Thanks to Simon for publishing this, and I invite you all: let’s go flying now! (Worry not, Mr. Rae, in 28 years of flying myself, I have never even scratched an airplane, you can come for a ride with me anytime - if you care to.
)
Thank you all for your perceptive comments, and please do see these two videos - in my admittedly non-objective view, perhaps they most clearly encapsulate the neo-Ballardian message I was experimenting with, the best of the lot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czwp2QMVi7Q BITTERSWEET CRASHING
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aixfIcSm7U SWEET CRASH DREAMS
Thanks to all commenters and viewers, and most especially to Simon -
Crashman
graham, i am not convinced ballard these days is “creeped out” by crash. sure, he can’t relate to the person who wrote it, most of all for the obvious reason that he’s a settled man in old age now. yes, i’ve read comments where he now revises the enthusiasm he showed for his thesis back then, but this doesn’t invalidate the book or its ideas.
as for your bold assumption that “any mentality that thinks that people are only interested in aviation because of crashes is a naive and deluded and disturbed one projecting its own Rorschach blood-death orgasm pathologies onto the wider public”, as far as i can see the crashman is suggesting that’s a major, deep-seated and unacknowledged reason why people are interested in aviation, not the *only* reason. big difference, there. and he’s hardly in a club of one.
as it happens, i read a quote from ballard, and i think it was relatively recent in terms of publication, in which he suggests that people go to car races due to a latent desire to see the drivers burned alive in a gasoline apocalypse… i can’t find the quote right now but i’ll certainly have a good look for it.
Agreed! What if all auto races were conducted in perfect safety for the cars and drivers? Would the spectator-interest be as large as it is now? Was the scriptwriter in the “Waldo Pepper” film correct, as in the Ballard quotation Simon cites above? Are most people at the races and airshows subconsciously gratifying themselves with the constant possibility of violent, flaming - and fatal - collisions?
I have a lifelong interest in and love of aviation, and certainly am much more attracted by the pure joyous freedom of mechanical flight in 3 dimensions and excitement of conquering Gravity - as Mankind has dreamed of for millennia now. Flying a plane is a joyous experience for me. The idea of safety and AVOIDING crashing the plane is obviously at the root of ALL aviation training - but as one of my friends said upon seeing these videos, “I generally enjoy flying, but every time I buckle in, there a lingering sense of woe in the back of my mind…”
Probably the oddest result of the experiment was when I posted links to these videos on some other pilot-oriented aviation sites I frequent - to my amazement, the feedback from other pilots was just about 100% positive and interested. They instinctively understand these films - they show what we must AVOID and learn from, upon pain of death. I expected the videos to be dismissed immediately as some sort of disgusting, ghoulish crash-fetishism - but that did not occur. Even from professional airline pilots and actual Government-agency aircraft-accident investigators.
I can assure you then, that very few real aviators dismiss these as mere ghoulish air-CRASH techoviolence for its own sake… and you may have noticed that there are about as many interesting nonfatal accidents and laboratory crash-safety testing videos interwoven into my vids as there are fatalities. The reality here is about the same as with cars - there are many more NON-fatal accidents that occur daily, rather than fatal and tragic violent crashes. Yet both airshows and car-racing draw huge crowds, possibly because of the sheer danger of dangerous maneuvers being performed at such speeds, and the ever-present possibility of witnessing a violent crash… who can say? It is easy to deplore the tragedy and human agony involved - but JGB never shrank away from the subject, and neither did I.
To enlarge on the statement JGB made in the film I referenced on the Ballardian YouTube channel above, I might say that from a simple examination of the technologies involved, the designs that suggest an extension of Man’s speed, power and sexuality expressed in steel, jet-power, chromium, and aluminum - we might be able to deduce every psychologically important aspect of our current society and culture from simply examining the structure and intentional design of a modern airliner or military fighter-jet.
Among pilots, your rank and status is certainly directly related to the power, size and design of the aircraft you fly, in the same way that people express themselves by their consumer-choices in automobile design… and MANY pilots express themselves and their relation to their aircraft in openly sexual terms.
Planes are always female, like ships, and Cronenberg’s film of *Crash* visually smacks us with the sexy curves of aircraft aerodynamic structures, how the smooth, elegant curves of a nose cowling or wing-surface suggest the sensuous curves of a beautiful woman’s body… and the film includes a rather explicit scene of a sexual encounter in an aircraft hangar. Who would dispute that speed, power, and deliberately sensually suggestive vehicle-design is sexy? I wouldn’t - to me the delightful sensations of a wild, rolling, diving, sharp-turning free maneuvering flight are second only to an actual sexual experience…and even after I land, I walk away with that kind of breathless exhilaration dominating my emotional state. It is a rare thrill indeed, and the future promises even better technology - the ability to fly free in Space itself, weightless and far above all Earthly concerns.
Tell you what, mate: Enjoy this computer-produced video of a rocketplane flight (this spacecraft has been built, and will actually fly before 2010 is over, google “xcor lynx”). Then tell me if the sheer rush of accelerating to Mach 2 and heading straight up into space on four thundering rocket engines doesn’t induce a quasi-sexual power and gratification-feeling. I think it’s an unbeatable thrill, as so many astronauts have already expressed.
See this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a-l1tb1rPg
Then try THIS - the European EADS Astrium rocketplane demo vid, beautiful women rocketing into Space in tight spacesuits - then weightless, dreamy suborbital flight:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7300000/newsid_7300600/7300678.stm?bw=nb&mp=wm&news=1&ms3=6&ms_javascript=true&nol_storyid=7300678&bbcws=2
(double-click on the 2nd video for full-screen, also hit the Full-screen control on the
YouTube Lynx Rocketplane video.. and for the FULL experience, also turn your sound UP!)
Thanks to all commenters! - Crashman
Pornographers are great rationalizers, it seems.
There’s nothing at all modern, much less post-modern, about the urge to revel in death.
The Coliseum in Rome in a monument to how potent the urge is.
“Ballardian”? Balls!
Well, this one just got BoingBoinged, see:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/09/plane-crash-video-fe.html
goldstone, as far as i can tell, ballard’s — and crashman’s — point is that modern *technology* provides many more opportunities for these latent impulses to emerge. as far as i’m aware, the internet, mass media landscape, and around the clock surveillance cameras weren’t around back then to record what went on in the coliseum, under the guise of news, security, what have you, only for the footage to be later recycled for ‘pornographic’ consumption in the privacy of one’s own home…
et cetera.
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it goes without saying that the death-wish is a latent aspect in flight, as it is with motor racing. i’ve been to quite a few motor races and seen hundreds on TV and the wish to see a serious crash isn’t even latent; at best it’s liminal. I’ve seen racers killed, too. Was my shock at their deaths guilt? Not sure.
As Milan Kundera (not a fan) says: we’re afraid of heights because we want to throw ourselves to our deaths. And technology provides ever greater heights.
I didnt watch the videos. I think crashman is beyond psychiatric help. And I, too, won’t be taking a flight with him in a hurry. Maybe I’m wrong, but for what it’s worth I don’t think JGB would want to watch them either - I think he would want to watch you watching them…
“…but for what it’s worth I don’t think JGB would want to watch them either - I think he would want to watch you watching them…”
Thank you Mr. Parkinson! Finally someone explicitly cuts to the core of the Experiment here -and why I called it an “Experiment” in the first place. And just for the record, I’ve been “beyond psychiatric help” ever since I read my first JGB short story… when I was about eleven years of age. Would it surprise you to learn that I also currently hold a major American university doctorate and a rather hard-to-get professional license to do other things than just pilot airplanes and make videos like these - just for the purpose of observing other people’s reactions to them? I thought it might. Try looking at the videos before you judge them; it’s quite definitely the crux of the experiment. If you’re just expecting to see dead bodies, you’ll be quite disappointed. But your insight into the Ballardian core of this little Experiment is unsurpassed, so far - except by Simon, and a few of the people at BoingBoing.
Please answer me this, I’m still puzzling over it - why do these videos now have well over 1.3 Million unique views on YouTube alone? Could it be.. that perhaps millions of others are seeing something there that you have chosen to refuse to watch? Why did they make such a choice in the first place - with so much else competing for their finite time and attention-spans? I am not at work here, sir. Something else is. What is it?
Firstly, it doesn’t surprise me at all to read you have professional qualifications - wasnt Vaughan a “scientist”? I have no qualifications myself, and I do not hold people with them in esteem.
So, why do these videos have 1.3 million hits …? I in no way wish to denigrate what you’re saying - I consider you a fellow astronaut of inner space (an astronaut with a pilot’s license!) - but won’t videos of beheadings in Iraq have equal numbers of hits? Are they Ballardian? Is something other than blood lust at work there?
I don’t think I can sum up JGB’s work in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies here. I take it for granted that there will be a latent reason behind 1.3 million people viewing your videos. I don’t know … Flight is an erotic dream, so … flight-death = orgasm…?
There’s a book I’ve been wanting to read; I think it’s called black box recorder. JGB had it in his top ten books in User’s Guide to the Millenium. It’s comprised of edited transcripts taken from black box recorders recovered from fatal air accidents - the last words of pilots as they struggle to save their aircraft. I think this might be more my cup of tea.
Maybe I’ll watch the videos after dinner … don’t know.
ps. I’ve just bought a plastic lobster and an old telephone from two charity shops - saw them absolutely by chance - the miracle of the street. I’m more a diletante than a Vaughan.
Just watched the videos. Without wishing to be callous, I think they could be made much more interesting. Cut the music for a start, it makes the videos seem ironic or satirical. The start of the helicopter one is sort of A Clockwork Orange. If you’re gonna have music make it more David Lynch rather than Stanley Kubrick - more the sound of human cell division amplified a million times.
And the videos, for me, are too linear. They need to be slowed down to the point were they barely move, like wildlife footage of an unfurling flower filmed over days, only in reverse.
All that said, I’m glad your stuffs on the site. I’ve enjoyed reading the comments.
All excellent points, Ian. i am certainly no film-maker of great skill ( or equipment) and alas, i have never met two people with identical musical tastes. Your suggestion on better Ballardian music is great. And there are now TWO “Black Box” crash-recorder (in real life, they are painted Signal Orange) books - there’s a 2nd. edition. They’re lying on my chairside book-table just now. They are available on Amazon.
whatever your film making skills are, theyre better than mine. i might buy the black box book tomorrow. just bought childermass by wyndham lewis though so ive spent my book allowance for this week.
would it be wise to ask for a flight in a low flying aircraft from a man called crashman if i’m ever in your neck of the woods?
Thank you Ian! I’m sure you can find it by searching your branch of the Amazon literary tree- and when you do, you will be autobot-offered all sorts of interesting plane crash books. Searching JGB’s name there also results in many interesting “relateds”. I hope I have not seemed disputatious in any way here; that is quite unprofessional in the literary world, as I understand it. I simply strove to be a creator, rather than a critic - a dangerously exposed role when working with material like this, but one I assumed by my own choice.
On this site, (and hopefully in my little video experiment) you will always find my finger pointing in JGB’s direction -and may modern medicine lengthen his life! And so here I will step aside and move on, taking my cue from the Oracle himself: Here it is, take it as you find it: like it, dislike it, excoriate or condemn the work or me personally or praise the work - it really makes no difference now. Your opinions and choices are ALWAYS your own, and you are most certainly entitled to them. In all the interviews I have seen with JGB, he certainly never seems to take any criticism personally, but rather returns it with kindness, and a general desire to explain himself and make his own work understood better - by even those who condemn it in the sharpest and most personal terms. These personally condemnatory critics are merely confusing the man who created it with the work itself…
This Experiment, like a novel, has been written down in video-bits and words -in its intention and rather surprising results- to the best of my poor abilities and is now finished. Simon, our indefatigable Publisher of all things Ballardian, has accepted it according to his own Ballardian standards (he is a free Webmaster and quite a gentleman, and the only person whom I know of that has achieved a Doctorate in Ballardianism -remarkable indeed!) The writing, the videomaking, and all of this work is over and done, the “book” may be read by anyone interested and then laid aside. But I am VERY gratified to see that Simon Sellars found my poor offerings suitable enough to make accessible to us who sit at the Ballardian table… I can only imagine what Mr. Ballard went through in 1974, as critical reaction to his novel came in! And again in 1997, with the Cronenberg film.
Did he feel personally attacked by the critics who confused the work with the Man behind it? I think not… and is he a warm, kind, and friendly person who loves others and finds delight in their company? Certainly he is, he said so himself, and his every personal act, spoken word, or appearance is consistent with that. He had no desire that readers of *Crash* and the viewers of the film made of the work should take it upon themselves as some sort of license to drive maniacally and injure others. He in fact seems to have found it incomprehensibly ridiculous that the British Film Board would see it as such a thing. I can merely hope you would find me so as well. Like JGB, I seriously doubt that any relatively sane fans of violent movies and fiction about murderers would take them as an invitation run out and shoot or kill someone. Perhaps “relatively sane” are the key words here…?
And I can assure you that the liberation of mechanical atmospheric and Space-flight are purely joyous to me - and I am a human being like you, with all the faults and perhaps some of the few merits that go with being human. I wept openly upon witnessing the Challenger and Columbia spaceflight-disasters on television… those superb Astronauts died while lifting us all to the stars, and willingly took the great risks involved.
Like JGB, I’d like to think that I certainly take no sick, pathological pleasure in the sufferings of others - but it IS necessary to consider this technological violence, and even sometimes to personally witness it. JGB has expressly stated that the interpretation of this at all possible levels is the basic task of any serious modern writer - and who here would disagree?
(see: SWEET CRASH DREAMS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aixfIcSm7U )
I know many people who have lost their parents, friends, and colleagues to serious disability or death in air and motor disasters, as most of us now -unfortunately- do.
Yet as pilots, as drivers, as participants in our society itself, we all must now witness -and sometimes even participate in- all of this. It is, as always, the obscure depths of the human mind, and our rapidly-evolving subconsciously-shaped society -at the often cruelly psychotic and anti-humanistic dissociative mercies of its own techno-environment, collective mass psychosis, and psychically disturbing design and architecture- that are the true fascination here. Again, Mr. Ballard guides us all. (And surely not with my own preceding long and syntactically clumsy sentence!)
I’ll close by answering your final question: because of the peculiarly invasive nature of the Internet and my desire, like Mr. Ballard’s, to keep at least some degree of personal privacy, I have found it necessary to write here and have my videos hosted rather anonymously: I must quite literally hide myself behind a pseudonym. JGB now finds himself -willingly or not- a public celebrity, a status that my own trivial work certainly does not merit and that I have no desire for.
But thanks to Simon, I am able to be granted a bit of a personal interview about this experiment by interested persons like you, with an opportunity to be asked questions and to respond freely here, among our fellow Ballardians. So let me answer your final question with a Socratically Ballardian one of my own. Should you take a plane ride with me? Well, I certainly don’t know if you would be comfortable: you have no way of knowing me or my level of piloting skill and dedication to flight safety personally. And my chosen pseudonym is indeed rather intimidating (and also deliberately designed to be non-unique to all the disturbingly-omniscient Internet search engines: it turns out that there are many “Crashmen” out there). But would you gladly have taken a long, fast car journey with Mr. Ballard at the wheel in 1975? I certainly would…. and I’d bet that you would too.
Closing now with best regards to all the thoughtful and kind commenters and fellow Ballardians above (and again with especial thanks to Simon),
I must remain,
the Crashman.
Nice to have been a fellow passenger on Ballardian, Crashman. Sorry if my comments seemed in any way arrogant - I’m writing in snatched moments and time dictates the form. Sadly, though, I think maybe sometimes I am one of those insufferable web critics who sits in a bedroom brooding over his ego.
Would I take a car ride with JGB in 1975?
Would I do the William Tell routine with William Burroughs in 1959?
Pass me the glass, Crashman. But check your sights first….
Oh don’t worry Ian - I never miss, I’m always right, I never lie, I know everything, - and so
elect me President! Steady now…. stand quite still… why is my hand wavering? The gunsights are blurry and do not line up in my vision… Could this be something Ballardian buried in my subconscious? If so, what is it? Perhaps the attraction of taking strange and exotic risks? No…. I must wait! I do not have the family fortune that enabled Mr. Burroughs to bribe the Policia and flee Mexico after the results of his act…
Awww, the hell with it! (puts gun down on table, seizes glass from atop Ian’s head, fills it to the brim with fine Scotch and hands it to him….)
Here Ian, you’ll need a little pick-me-up before we go flying today - drink it all down now, mate! You’ll be glad of it a bit later… and as we roar on down the runway, totally dependent on a pounding, shaking piston engine and its irregular series of internal detonations for our very lives, muse on this: William Burroughs died at a ripe old age, as a world-famous writer and visionary surrealist artist… but who grieves for his poor wife? Who indeed…?
Pass me that bottle, please, Ian. I’m sorry, there will be no flight today, you have made me think too much- always a risky act in itself, here among the Ballardians. And yes, I admit it: every time I buckle in, there is that lingering sense of woe in the back of my mind… it’s like an amnesia, an unknown grief for people I never knew. Yes, that’s it, - AMNESIA (Long-Term Memory Loss)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihih_XqeJv0
Not exactly the same as the others on your site, but I found it fascinating nonetheless:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8df_1205185501
Regards,
Dan
Sweet and elegant find, Dan! To add or subtract anything from this beauty would be like throwing crankcase oil on a Renoir. It stands on its own, and yes, that is exactly how the pros do it. Cool and calm and crisp on the radio, your backseater’s job is ONLY to handle the systems, radio and the nav-communications, and get you cleared down thru civilian airspace with Kansas City Center so you don’t suddenly meet American Airlines Flight 95 to Cincinnati on the swoopdown back to Whiteman USAF base. YOUR job is to handle this hot, bucking bird and get ‘er down there, arriving at exactly the right course, altitude, and airspeed on final approach to Whiteman.
He’s head-down in the back watching the gauges rise into the red and the bright red and yellow system-failure lights blink ON while you’re up front and eyeballs OUT making that beautiful 13-mile curving swoop down and around to the runway heading. He’ll tell you anything important about the plane, and talk you through ONLY anything important you might overlook - this is not a time for chatter or distraction. It’s a scary, busy job just flying a flaming bird: any control or essential hydraulic/electric system might explode, damage adjacent systems and critical lines, or drop offline at any moment, or the stick might just freeze solid like it’s suddenly set in concrete. He’ll remind you that when flightspeed airflow thru the engine-fire ceases, the fire WILL “stagnate”, bloom UP and engulf the aircraft instead of being blown out past and thru the exhaust. Heat rises in still air…
And his wingman is telling him his R afterburner is OUT, and he sees fire…fire.. fire.. that’s NOT going out!
They had an arrestor-cable set out for him at the far end, but he couldn’t catch it and couldn’t risk overturning the burning bird.when he overran… no hydraulics, no brakes, no flaps! I’d punch too: sliding to a halt trapped upside-down in a mass of already- flaming kerosene and aluminum is not a good way to turn in your license…
So they punched and went for a little butt-rocket ride up and away, before automatic seat-separation left them floating gently back down. Maybe a little bit spine-shorter than when they boarded the aircraft for the flight… but alive and well and fit to fly again with a little rest - and the traditional double-shot of whiskey from the flight surgeon, after he/she has checked you out and determined you just need to lie down for a while. Stress medicine! Welcome to the Caterpillar Club!
This guy was good, he only even started breathing heavy when the runway threshold came closer.. and closer… any oscillation of the pitch attitude would be deadly at this point… steady now.. flare… touchdown.. hold her straight with rudder… aannd -nope! NO braking action, she’s going off the far end! Time to leave, and their heads are braced back and spine STRAIGHT, with 2 sets of hands already on the yellow- striped handles that will automatically blow the canopy, pull their ankles back out of the way of the panel, and safely boost them clear, FAST up and awwaaaayy…
And finally the comic relief when they’re out and the HUD-cam and the now-unmanned bird’s off into the far-end weeds - the feminine voice of the emergency annunciator (usually called “Bitching Betty”) says “bingo fuel!” - i.e. you’re critically low ‘cos the sloshing around in the crackup tripped the low-fuel sensor.. and yes, the LEFT engine is now also overtemp in the FTIT (Turbine Internal Temperature) - probably because its intake dug into the dirt!
Bitch all you want, Betty! They’re gone upwards FAST and floating down gently courtesy of some very fine ejection or “crew egress” systems design engineers, and looking forward to the truck ride back to debriefing lounge. Betty’s problems belong to the firetrucks and the salvage crew chief now. But she’ll get fixed up and fly again.
And so will the fine, fine men that flew her back home.
‘I am searching for the answers myself.’
crashman