Ballardian

Photo: Stephen Hughes.

Read recently…

+ Via Fanny Magnate, David Chandler’s essay on the work of photographer Stephen Hughes:

Over the last five years Hughes has worked all over Europe, developing an interest in what might be called ‘peripheral places’, sometimes places literally on the edge — of cities perhaps, or by the sea — but also pockets of space that seem self-contained, primed with their own sense of purpose yet often empty, unnoticed, in between. They may be the by-product of urban development, they may be border areas or roadside wastelands, or simply off-centre, marginal to the flows of human existence … re-sited in South-East England, J.G. Ballard seemed more than content to exist in this future, in a ‘peripheral’ landscape now more rational and systematic.
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Like the travel writer Charles Prentice in [Ballard's Cocaine Nights], Stephen Hughes would confess to being a ‘professional tourist’ in this world, funding his own work by operating as a travel photographer. In Prentice’s appraisal of the Costa del Sol as a place of ‘willed limbo’, the images of Ballard and Hughes come into even closer proximity…”

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+ Via Futurismic, ‘R.P.M.’, the latest short story from Chris Nakashima-Brown. Now I fully understand Chris’s long-standing paparazzi death-drive obsession, as codified in his recent analysis of Operation Paget, ‘eight-hundred-plus pages of pure clinical Ballardian detail remixed with Spectacular Baudrillardian celebrity media fireworks’. That piece ended with a meditation on real-life incidents involving Reece Witherspoon, Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz and bone-snap-happy photographers — raw fodder for ‘R.P.M’, as it turns out:

The doors blow open and Jessica Astart, 21-year-old phenom, basks in the flash bulbs of the paparazzi. Teen Titan, a pop cultural icon manufactured overnight, with a likely half-life measurable in months. Star of the new War-on-Terror dramedy Homeland Insecurity…

The starter hacks like a geezer trying to kick a four-pack a day habit. 0z0 pumps the gas pedal… Cardwheel clicker of Percy’s Super-8 as she starts burning her reel. I check my seat belt and adjust the focus on my Nikon… Jessica’s driver pulls the Navigator into traffic, white metal tuna ready for the kill.

KKKKKKEEEERRRRUUUUUUUUUUNCHH.

The windshield fills with white as the Monte Carlo punctures the left drivers’ side door and rear quarter panel… Tinted windows shatter and blow, exposing Jessica as she screams, the secret sphincters of her facial muscles contorting her pampered dermis into a horrifying rictus a hundred times over, once for each of the dilating shutters excitedly popping off in her face—our half-dozen cameras and those of the true paparazzi excitedly seizing upon the sudden scene.”

It’s a long time since I’ve read fiction written in the present tense (the horrible Mad Max novelisations put me off PT for life), but it really works in this instance. Given the immediacy of Chris’s concerns, I doubt it could be told any other way. Also, I wonder, is Mr N-B a Jack Womack fan?

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+ Via Johnny Strike, more on the mad astronaut meme. According to this article:

What would happen if an astronaut came unglued in space and, say, destroyed the ship’s oxygen system or tried to open the hatch and kill everyone aboard? … It turns out NASA has a detailed set of written procedures for dealing with a suicidal or psychotic astronaut in space. The documents, obtained this week by The Associated Press, say the astronaut’s crewmates should bind his wrists and ankles with duct tape, tie him down with a bungee cord and inject him with tranquilizers if necessary.

The instructions do not spell out what happens after that. But NASA spokesman James Hartsfield said the space agency, a flight surgeon on the ground and the commander in space would decide on a case-by-case basis whether to abort the flight, in the case of the shuttle, or send the unhinged astronaut home, if the episode took place on the international space station.

The crew members might have to rely in large part on brute strength to subdue an out-of-control astronaut, since there are no weapons on the space station or the shuttle. A gun would be out of the question; a bullet could pierce a spaceship and could kill everyone. There are no stun guns on hand either.
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Depression, feelings of isolation and stress are not unheard of during long stays in space in tight quarters.
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During missions in 1985 and 1995, shuttle commanders put padlocks on the spaceships’ hatches as a precaution since they didn’t know the scientists aboard very well. Some crew members, called payload specialists, are picked to fly for specific scientific or commercial tasks and do not train as extensively with the other astronauts.

The article admits that NASA does not really know what would happen to the mad astronaut who needs to be restrained and shot back to Earth. But Ballard, in his short story, ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974), does:

As if watching a film, [Melville] remembered his … single abortive mission as an astronaut. By some grotesque turn of fate, he had become the first astronaut to suffer a mental breakdown in space. His nightmare ramblings had disturbed millions of television viewers around the world, as if the terrifying image of a man going mad in space had triggered off some long-buried innate releasing mechanism.
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These illustrations of the Pacific atoll, with its vast concrete runways, he had collected over the previous months. Melville’s real interest had been in the island itself, a World War II airbase and now refuelling point for trans-Pacific passenger jets. The combination of scuffed sand and concrete, metal shacks rusting by the runways, the total psychological reduction of this man-made landscape, seized his mind in a powerful but ambiguous way.
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Melville prowled along the mantelpiece of the beach-house, slapping the line of photographs. ‘Look at those runways, everything is there. A big airport like the Wake field is a zone of tremendous possibility — a place of beginnings, by the way, not ends’.
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He resolved to make his world-wide journey, externally to Wake Island, and internally across the planets of his mind”.