Ballardian

+ Three lovely Ballardian riffs…

1) Dan Lockton over at the awesome Architectures of Control, a blog that analyses the ways in which products are designed to restrict user behaviour, guides us through a new initiative at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5: the removal of seating so that patrons have no choice but to spend great wads of cash in restaurants and cafes or else stand in extreme discomfort in an atmosphere of ‘excitement, stress, tiredness, and above all, confinement’. Dan ties it all up with a big, bad Ballardian bow, referencing the ‘bleak badlands’ of Kingdom Come.

2) Patrick Cates takes us on a tour of the A12, with its ’steady stasis of light industry and dark housing. The steady north-south flux of strangers. The steady external gush. The steady internal hush.’ Ballard’s Concrete Island is the guidebook.

3) And finally, over at fretmarks, pluvialis describes driving down the M25 near Ballard’s home town of Shepperton and witnessing a flock of parakeets (or ‘posh sparrows’) darting across the sky. From there she ruminates on their significance: were they ‘extras in The African Queen, or a Tarzan movie, set free at the end of the shoot because no-one could catch them in Shepperton’s vast sound-stages’? Or did Ballard himself have something to do with it:

I love it. Rich, strange, crazy. These parakeets still seem exotic, but they fit so precisely in the Ballardian aesthetic that it’s tempting to think that Ballard himself released the buggers. That strangest and most disturbing of his messianic tales, The Unlimited Dream Company, is full of parrots, bursting into irrepressible life as Shepperton sprouts lush jungle vegetation and our possibly-drowned aviator finds it impossible to leave.”