About Ballard

In 1974, JG Ballard gave an interview to an 18-year-old admirer, Akihiko Kokuryo, and offered a message to readers of the speculative fiction magazine in which it was published. Translated into Japanese and then back into English it feels like a pretty good way of coping with the modern world that he predicted so well, so often: 

I hope that you will always be skeptical, passionate, analytic, revolutionary, idealistic, dream-like, serene and hallucinated.

And in searching for an image, I find this clipping. We all have those mammoth novels deep inside, don’t we?

Not waving but typing

I knew this was going to happen. No sooner do I announce that I’m taking a blogging sabbatical when I suddenly get my mojo back; although to be honest I hesitated in writing this post because the subject matter is so sad. It’s about 14-year-old Kayleigh Lawrie, who died when a car driven by a drunk friend of her father went off the road in Lincolnshire, shortly after she’d updated her Facebook status: “I think I’m going to die. xx. luv you all”. It’s just such a 21st-century story, the collision of technologies, digital banality versus analogue brutality, Mark Zuckerberg meets JG Ballard head-on. Five decades ago or so people wanted to live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Now all we have is the unutterable pathos of those two lower-case kisses.

Crash bang wallop

So there I am, standing at the junction of Rama IV and Sathorn and Witthayu, the point at which Bangkok’s drivers believe they’re Italian for five seconds and inevitably I think of JG Ballard and then I remember that in the early 80s you could get on Top of the Pops with a song inspired by Ballard and because I’m a lazy, busy, sloppy, half-arsed blogger, and can’t even keep to my own self-imposed rules, all I can offer is this:

The world's a stage

JG Ballard appears to be still firing on all cylinders:

Today only bad actors can lead a nation, as Reagan and Blair showed. Poor Gordon Brown needs six months at Rada and a tryout at the Old Vic.

The Tony Blair memorial post

Milking more encores than James Brown, he's finally stumbled back to the dressing room to enjoy a responsible low-alcohol lager and a bowl of M+Ms with all the red ones taken out. No groupies, just Hazel Blears to service his ego.

Like most of us, I'm still not really sure what to make of Mr Tony, so I offer you an appropriately disjointed and confused post, borrowing bits and pieces from various places to present something that looks coherent but isn't really. I'm also slightly hampered by the fact that YouTube is still verboten in the Land of Smiles, so the usual recourse for bloggers devoid of inspiration and energy is not available.

But anyway: the lovely Amylola draws my attention to another review of WTTM, this time at 3am Magazine; coincidentally, about three and a half years late, I uncover a roundup of music books that describes one of my previous efforts as "sugary and a bit tacky", which is pretty close to the truth, to be fair; everything you always wanted to know about stock photos; happy birthday, Helvetica (and yah boo to Comic Sans).

And I know I shouldn't find the story about virtual paedophiles in Second Life remotely funny, even in a bleak and disturbing way, so let's just call it oddly Ballardian (which is pretty much the same thing, with literary pretensions).

Auto biography

This last week, I did a few things I should have done before. I watched Dominik Moll's excellent Lemming, which is about infidelity, suicide, flying webcams, the nature of reality and, above all, plumbing. I listened properly to Stephin Merritt's Showtunes album, which is fey and funny and prickly and good. And I read JG Ballard's Crash.

The last one had been the most serious omission, not just because it's older than the others (first published in 1973) but because I referred to it in some depth when discussing 'Airbag', the opening track of OK Computer, in my forthcoming book. (Sorry, but I haven't mentioned it for a few hours.) The sexual/spiritual rush that Thom Yorke's narrator seems to achieve from near-annihilation on the road is prefigured by Ballard's deadpan prose. Many people have also remarked on the extent to which Ballard seemed to foresee the extent to which Princess Diana's fatal crash became a media event, riddled with psychosexual potential, even as she lay dying. Try this:

"A middle-aged cashier at the airport duty-free liquor store, she sat unsteadily in the crushed compartment, fragments of the tinted windshield set in her forehead like jewels. As a police car approached, its emergency beacon pulsing along the overhead motorway, Vaughan ran back for his camera and flash equipment. Taking off my tie, I searched helplessly for the woman's wounds. She stared at me without speaking, and lay on her side across the seat. I watched the blood irrigate her white blouse. When Vaughan had taken the last of his pictures he knelt down inside the car and held her face carefully in his hands, whispering into her ear. Together we helped to lift her on to the ambulance trolley."

It's as if the various stages in the narrative arc of Diana's life are scripted by different writers: Barbara Cartland for the introduction and development; Jackie Collins for the crisis and its immediate fallout; and a bizarre switch to Ballard for a highly unlikely (but, in retrospect, utterly inevitable) finale.

Which opens things up to you, dear reader. Take a historical or contemporary figure, and decide which writer or, even better, which peculiar combination of writers could best have written his or her life. And no conceptual gewgaws this time. As penance for the implication that I'd read a book when I hadn't, the author of the best one will receive a signed copy of my Radiohead book when it comes out.