December 2008

This is a bizarre match up: Mike Skinner of the Streets in conversation with the philosopher John Gray:
It seemed a good idea to put the pop star and the professor together, and so they met for a wide-ranging conversation — covering the art of storytelling and the imminent collapse of Western capitalism — in a north London pub hours before Skinner’s performance at the BBC Electric Proms.
…
MS: Isn’t it dangerous to say evil is natural?
JG: It’s the opposite. I’m a big fan of JG Ballard…
MS: I’m halfway through High-rise
JG: The very book I was going to mention! Ballard says that people from Catholic countries are less shocked by his books than people from Protestant countries, because they still believe in original sin – there are murderers and psychopaths inside us. It doesn’t mean you accept that state of affairs, it means you have rules and conventions which stand in the way. That’s what used to be called civilisation – though, of course, there’s nowhere that’s more than half...

I’m somewhat flattered. Diane Johnson, novelist and co-writer of the script to Kubrick’s The Shining, references ballardian.com in a review of Miracles of Life:
“Ballard’s novels, especially the early ones, have been treated by a range of serious critics, most notably in France. The late Jean Baudrillard, for example, wrote: ‘After Borges, but in a totally different register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on: a non-symbolic universe but one which, by a kind of reversal of its mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, cars, mechanical eroticism), seems truly saturated with an intense initiatory power’.
In fact this initiatory power was to wane along with the avant-garde itself, which, also like Ballard, simply got appropriated by the antiwar movement and eventually absorbed into an accepting, even welcoming mainstream. Though he, Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and others were striving for and finding a personal manner or experimental view, the Sixties mood of experiment seems to have had no legs. The experiments of the Sixties, like the experiments of the Thirties, ...

‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’, screening at Autopsy of the New Millennium, Barcelona. Photos: Simon Sellars.
For you, I have unearthed a trove of information about ‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’, Ann Lislegaard’s digital interpretation of Ballard’s novel. Recall that in my Barcelona report, I raved about it — as an undisputed highlight in an already outstanding exhibition.
The Light Project in St Louis, USA, recently staged this work as part of a series of site-specific commissions that illuminated the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts at Grand Center in St Louis, USA. By all accounts, the show was a great success and I only wish I could have seen this mesmerising work projected onto urban space; the ...

He turned his attention to me, tapping the bundle of handouts in his grip.
‘Get all the paper you can, Ballard. Some of the stuff they give away — “Mechanisms of Occupant Ejection”, “Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts” …’
As the last of the engineers stood back from the test car Vaughan nodded appreciatively, and commented sotto voce, ‘The technology of accident simulation at the R.R.L. is remarkably advanced. Using this set-up they could duplicate the Mansfield and Camus crashes — even Kennedy’s — indefinitely.’
‘They’re trying to reduce the number of accidents here, not increase it.’
‘I suppose that’s a point of view.’
Ballard, Crash.
[See post to watch QuickTime movie]
ABOVE: Recreation created in Crash Zone 8 by Neal Trantham, Nebraska Accident Reconstruction, LLC.
Do you think if Vaughan was alive today, he’d be using AutoCAD to design the optimum sex death of Eliz...

Over at the Transatlantis blog, there is an announcement of a new theme park patterned after Ballard’s work:
A new theme park is coming soon to Dubai. Named The Ultimate City, its theme will be the the world refracted through the many faceted crystal-like mind of writer J.G. Ballard. It will be distributed throughout the city to make it’s experience as much part of the urban fabric as possible. Some of the attractions will include:
• The Drowned World water park where guests can experience the rising sea levels of global warming as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
• As oil rapidly becomes a scarce commodity, Crashland will become the only place to partake in the visceral and intoxicating power of the internal-combustion engine.
• Get closer to the nuclear power of the sun over the ozone free Terminal Beach, or descend into the cool shade of vintage Bikini Atoll concrete nuclear blast bunkers scattered among it’s sandy dunes.
• In a special arrangement with the Burj Dubai, a large section of the world’s tallest skyscraper has been reserved for High Rise: a paint-ball arena where guests struggle for advan...

Solaris (last scene) (1972), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

‘”We do not move in one direction, rather do we wander back and forth, turning now this way and now that. We go back on our own tracks…” That thought of Montaigne’s reminds me about something I thought of in connection with flying saucers, humanoids, and the remains of unbelievably advanced technology found in some ancient ruins. They write about aliens, but I think that in these phenomena we are in fact confronting ourselves; that is our future, our descendants who are actually traveling in time.’
Andrei Tarkovsky
[via Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory, a site dedicated to the work of Chris Marker]

If a purely biographical study were undertaken, it could feasibly be argued that Ballard’s work is a variation on the one theme of his wartime experience. To take some examples from his oeuvre: the fake space station in ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, the patch of waste land in Concrete Island,...

LEFT: Joanne McNeil.
Recently, I was seriously puzzled by an attack from an anonymous (of course) ‘academic’ (female) on another forum that branded the contents of this site as ’seething with testosterone’. Well, you make of that what you will, but it reminded me of an incident back when I first attempted my doctoral thesis on Ballard, some 12 years ago. I vividly recall delivering a paper at a postgrad seminar and being roundly attacked during question time by a woman who was disgusted by my support of such a ‘deeply misogynistic writer’. I remember replying that in Ballard, it’s actually the male characters that have a pretty hard time of it, and if anything their flaws are more magnified and on display, thus supporting my interrogator’s sense of outrage about male attitudes in a roundabout way if she could only bring herself to see it thus.
Related to this, there was something else going on about Ballard’s female characters, something to do with male inadequacy in the wake of female intelligence, that I couldn’t quite articulate at the time but which Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum has perhaps nailed, in

ABOVE: Granny takes a trip… underground.

ABOVE: London Fields Lido, by Gigi Cifali.
A group of Sydney architects are doing their best to rob us of a Ballardian future.
As BLDGBLOG wryly notes, said architects are rehabilitating ‘backyard swimming pools into subterranean “granny flats” … a spatially innovative, if unexpected, way to assuage Sydney’s growing housing shortage’… The regions 360,000 swimming pools would first be emptied of their water and then transformed, through architectural intervention, into a comfortable domestic space, “complete with a small bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, garden alcove and rooftop windows.”‘
Imagine if this idea had caught on during Ballard’s formative years… No more disused, abandoned swimming pools; no more post-industrial anomie.

LEFT: Burroughs in 1963: ‘particularly spectral and menacing: a fitting mug shot for a literary outlaw’ (image via Reality Studio). RIGHT: Moorcock, from around the same era (image via Moorcock’s Miscellany).

Over at Reality Studio, there’s an excellent interview with Michael Moorcock, conducted by Mark P. Williams. Naturally, Moorcock is as insightful discussing Burroughs and the Beats as he has been analysing the New Wave and Ballard, and I think he sums up Kerouac for me, too:
I read two books while hitchhiking from Sweden to France and was starving by the time I got to Paris — On the Road by Kerouac and Brideshead Revisited by Waugh. I thought On the Road a bit of a wank and the Waugh a bit frozen in a time which meant almost nothing to me.
And then came Burroughs…
Read the interview for more on the intersection of three great writers (there’s quite a ...

Chris Coste dreamed of playing major-league baseball from the age of seven. But after eleven grueling years in the minors, a spot on a major-league roster still seemed just out of his reach–until that fateful call came from the Philadelphia Phillies in May 2006. At age thirty-three (“going on eighty”), Coste was finally heading to the big time.The 33-Year-Old Rookie is like a real-life Rocky, an unforgettable and inspirational story of one man’s unwavering pursuit of a lifelong goal. Beginning in a single-parent home in Fargo, North Dakota, and ending behind home plate on the flawless diamond of the Phillies’ Citizens Bank Park–where fans and teammates call him “Chris Clutch” because of his knack for getting timely hits–this intimate account of Coste’s baseball odyssey is a powerful story of determination, perseverance, and passion. For eleven seasons, Coste hustled, fought, and gritted his way to his breakthrough–and never lost faith in his abilities. Along the way, he gained the affection and admiration of baseball fans from Ottawa and Scranton to various Mexican and Venezuelan cities. Battered by years spent behind a catcher’s mask, and faced with bracing realities–there were bills to pay, and...

Further to Mike Moorcock, Frendz and Hawkwind all turning up in Mike Bonsall’s brilliant excavation of Ballard’s neural motorway, and then the passing away of Jim Cawthorn, let’s return to John Coulthart.
John, who has designed a few Hawkwind record covers in his time, has unearthed a comic strip from the November 29th, 1971 edition of Frendz. It’s written by Moorcock and illustrated by Cawthorn, and features Hawkwind as sonic supermen.
See John’s post for more detail, and also the next page of the strip.
SONIC ATTACK
by Hawkwind
lyrics by Michael Moorcock
sung by Bob Calvert (with Lemmy)
In case of Sonic Attack on your district, follow these rules:
If you are making love it is imper...

Cover scan via Moorcock’s Miscellany.
David Pringle reports that the fantasy and SF illustrator, James Cawthorn, has died. Cawthorn was a fixture of the New Worlds era, and had a strong link to Ballard’s work. He illustrated Ballard’s ‘Equinox’ for NW #142 (above), and also wrote in 1967 what is surely the very first JGB pastiche, a fragment entitled ‘Ballard of a Whaler’, for New Worlds #170. I’ve reproduced the piece below, in a move that is bound to enrage further the killjoys who have attacked this site for running the occasional pastiche in the past. But as ‘Ballard of a Whaler’ demonstrates, the Ballard pastiche actually has a long and noble history.
For more on Cawthorn and his work with New Worlds and...

by MIKE BONSALL

The Westway from a spot near Little Venice, west London. Photo: Simon Crubellier.
‘J.G. Ballard, the visionary creator of drowned worlds, Vermillion Sands, and now at work on a novel about a motorway desert island…’
Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries.
‘Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London. Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre.’
J.G. Ballard,