How J G Ballard earned his own adjective
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- čas přidán 28. 10. 2023
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When the college I was working at was planning the official opening of the new art block I seriously suggested we get JGB to open it (we were in his neck of the woods after all), my pleas fell on deaf ears unfortunately, and so we got a royal prince instead… bit of a missed opportunity I think… RIP JGB… first stumbled across your work as a schoolboy in London… fifty years later your still our prophet…
Brilliant essay! Loved the part where Ballard interrupted you at 12:30 to tell the truth. And what you said shortly after: "The anxiety of our modern existence is that we expect it is a fiction, and that just beneath that fiction are all the ancient terrors we hoped modernity had saved us from." 🎯
Of course it's not true, modernity hasn't saved us from ancient terrors. Those terrors are part of modernity's story, and therefore an essential part of modernity itself. There's far more terror hiding beneath modernity than beneath "underdeveloped" societies.
A very good point at 12:35 indeed.
I'd also bring in Haruki Murakami, whose 'Clockwork Bird' tells the story the other way around.. modernity -does- enable terrors, at least as far back as HP Lovecraft.
Well said. I'm writing down much of what you've said here to quote to others. Nice job ximono
Thanks for that quote.@@micro-organism-pv5gd
@@micro-organism-pv5gdQuite simply, as technology advances, we fill the void of its possibilities with the most persistent and lively contents of our minds, so Napoleon thought Roman art would improve all things, Nintendo makes elaborate video games about monsters and fairies, and yes, France has been fatally tempted by whatever they keep in the Quai Branly these days. Greetings from Mexico, where the apple doesn't fall far from the tree..
My take on Ballard, even as a young science fiction reader, was that he was here to remind us of how quickly modern civilization could collapse, and that our existential paranoia was based on that fear. We are only one bomb away from having to build a fire. A few collapsed supermarkets from having to hunt. One destruction of a working government from subjugation or possibly having to kill. We need writers like Ballard to remind us of these things. It all could end so quickly, and devolve into barbarism. Scary stuff, yes, but the psychological burden of being a modern man.
Yup.
@ColbyHebert-wm2mw The last reply to my post was simply "Yup." So this came as a surprise. I sense that someone is a secret science fiction writer. Am I right?
You have a good grasp of Ballard. Great quotes as well.
Ballard seems to me to be a totally reliable narrator. As far as i can remember I have never felt that he "played" me as a reader through the use of clever writing tricks. The characters and plot always seem to follow the logic of the initial set up and the motivational energy assigned to them. I wonder if this is part of his appeal to modern artists. To me the novels feel like airplane journeys - they take off, cruise at altitude then descend and land. I have had the same feeling about 10 times in my life with really great musical performances where the performers were presumably in a flow state.
I'll have to do some re reading to confirm/deny this.
So Snowpiercer is a lazy reimagining of Ballard's tower, which is an homage to Dante?
Or Snowpiercer is a dystopian sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory…
No
Early depictions of hell were of a frozen waste, maybe the last glaciers were a memory not too distant.
What about the social commentary?
First rate research, writing, and production for JG Ballard and his many works and adaptations. Helped bring me up to speed on some of his tropes. Pleased to see some of the movies but I always thought they were more thought experiments. Bt this form of storytelling seems to have gained a new pane in the graphic novel.
"Asylums with doors open wide
Where people have paid to see inside
For entertainment they watch his body twist
Behind his eyes he says I still exist."
[Atrocity Exhibition - Joy Division's tribute to Ballard]
Fantastic editing, and visuals. I’d never heard of JG Ballard before, thanks for introducing him. I’ll add him to my listen list. The movie looks like a good watch, although the ratings are quite poor…
It's more like an overlong pop video.
I really love you for this! As my name suggests, I´m quite smitten with JGB! Also of note is his incredible influence on the vast post-punk generation. Whole music genres basically carry his DNA and he never knew how or why as hew just wasn´t listening to music much.
Ballards tower influenced by Bunuel's film The exterminating Angel.
Interesting, thank you
And then there is Themroc by Claude Feraldo from 1973. For some resaon this French piece of etreme cinema seems to be totally forgotten. It´s about Michel Piccolis as the inhabitant of a high-rise who starts speaking in grunts only and he blasts away the outer wall of his apartment and begins to live like a cave-man, soon building a tribe within his "cave" while neighbouring apartments follow suit. The< soon turn to archaic mating rituals and cannibalism and it all ends with authorities walling them in from the outside, with only a few air-holes for them to stick their arms through.
I have seen this only once in the mid-80s, a few years before I read High-RIse and I always wondered if Ballard had seen the movie.
I saw this video a few months ago, along with finding the Mind Webs performance of the Garden of Time. A few weeks ago, the Met Gala was themed to that Ballard short story. On a whim, I just bought and quickly finished a used copy of High-Rise. Thank you for introducing me to Ballard!
From an audio perspective this has the best editing of all your videos that I've listened to so far. I've replayed it so many times!
Thank you. It's the most advanced editing project I've completed so far.
This video drops right in the middle of my re reading of his books. Brilliant! I wish more would realize his brilliance especially here in North America
the algo knows all
Wow…I did NOT really notice all the pools in his writing before. Now that you’ve pointed this out though I realize there are *SO MANY POOLS* in his works. Thank you.
if it interests anyone to be aware, ballard (and burroughs) was my impetus for developing procedural poetry and song platforms. as per my natal chart and lack of fraternal affiliation, my own work is occluded over the decades while more visible procedural poetry platforms never seemed to get it right. all you have to do, is use pure randomisation to fit words in grammatical form. the english language always had a structure, not one other proceduralist deigned to actually use the rules of the english language when proposing aleatoric method. they all used some clever technical method. it all sucked.
my 'twirly purposes' video exhibits such technique (and a "guest" procedural lyrical technique which is distinctly different). of course i'm also afaik the first person in the world to implement procedural lyrical song in both nonrealtime and realtime form, but ML swiftly surpassed any other procedure's efficacy :)
there's of course more to it such as EVP but ballard was cued in on procedural media, unfortunately humanity at large missed it, because all that thought provoking information would develop critical thinking instead of buying it at the lodge oops i mean shops. you are being sat upon.
"aleatoric" - Thanks to you for expanding my vocabulary.
Another elegantly delivered analysis. I need to read more Ballard.
Thanks doc.
Well done! Enjoyable and informative.
Thanks for making this - very educational and sent me back to the books !
Thanks Gary
Honestly, as a massive fan of Ballard you've done a great job here with your analysis and with an engaging visual style as well.
I remember what living in a high rise apartment building was like. The Projects. Newark, NJ, 1961. My man Ballard was exactly on the money. I remember my mother fulling me away from the center of the elevator floor so I wouldn't step on the urine.
You do indeed create unique content.
I wonder if the artist Simon Stålenhag (e.g. Tales from the Loop) was influenced directly, or indirectly, from Ballard. The "vibe" seems very similar. Also, what was that art at 10:16?
Thank you for this
Reminds me of the old Hawkwind number
Flat block
Of two dimensions
Neon totem pole to the sky
Keeping scores of people stacked up so high
Above the ground
But all they can hear is the sound
Of the wind in the antennae
It's a human zoo
A suicide machine
Childhood
Of concrete cube shaped
A flypaper stuck with human life
Caged up rage
Swarming all the time
Tear out the telephones
Rip up the pages of directories
And wreck all these
High speed lifts and elevators
Be a sabotage rebel without a cause
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
All stacked up in a high rise block
Starfish
Of human blood shape
Tentacles of human gore
Spread out on the pavement from the 99th floor
Well somebody said that he jumped
But we know he was pushed
He was just like you might have been
On the 99th floor of a suicide machine
dAMN your killing it with these Ai images !!!!
The location for the movie High Rise was a disused leisure centre where I used to swim. Abandoned swimming pools indeed. Real life is reassuringly weird.
Re: Wilder. There's never one individual who is the biggest and strongest if that means the best unarmed fighter in any group over 1000 individuals. In groups of this size they'll be several individuals capable of inflicting death and crippling wounds on each other.
I discovered the fascinating work of mr Ballard in 1980 when I was a 18 year old - and I was hooked from the first paragraph of The Burning World... The rest is history...
Tried a couple of Ballard's novels and never could get into them. (Empire of the Sun as a movie is great, however.) I enjoyed this presentation and find myself satisfied that I haven't missed much that is compatible with my recreational reading.
This is a commentary of how society is weird and dysfunctional.
I think this is your best video essay yet, both in content and presentation. Well done!
Do you think Ballard would/could have applied his same perspective to the pre-modern man/world? An abandoned pool is an ingenious symbol for our particular breed of nihilism (and maybe it’s the only breed of nihilism), but what about the ocean? Is Ballard’s nihilism just as present in a non-modern world?
Thank you. It's a new editing style. Great fund to make. I suspect nihilism is a specifically modern attitude. If you really, truly believe the materialist paradigm, with all fantasy stripped away, nihilism is the only honest response. But I don't, so...;)
Yes! I think Ballard sees this brutal meaninglessness written into the universe. Just look at the uncaring brutality of nature of his early works. No one ever looks at a landscape in Ballard and thinks "How pretty". Lol. Modernity is just a skin we have applied to try and cope with our own ultimate futility - the blood and the animal desires that we constantly try to wish away. in this sense, the people in Crash who get off on death and sex are ant-heroes, because they see the world for what it really is. Well, that's always been my take 😉
Fantastic!
Fascinating
Thank you,Am a fan
Dangerous bends ahead-Speed Up!
Yes
So, I recently picked up Crash and I am struggling with it. Off the cuff I find it quite repulsive. I haven't been able to conquer my own biases against the graphic and disturbing sex that is rampant throughout the story to get to Ballard's message. These triggers of mine, I recognize, are likely unresolved psychological trauma from very early exposure when I was young and not mature enough to process. I may have to avoid Ballard's writing and focus on what others write about him in my effort to understand his message.
I think this is a major weakness of Ballard, don't feel you have to keep at it.
LOL, but I will. It's compulsive. I NEED to understand. I am terminally curious. I'm a librarian by profession - that might explain the compulsion. Thank you for all your videos.
@ColbyHebert-wm2mw I was talking about the novel Crash. I have not read Day of Creation. Perhaps, you replied to my post in error?
High-Rise is my favourite of the Ballard books and of the films it is my favourite as I'm working class I'm very much like the cleaner watching these professionals who hate everything in there lives but are doing the snakes and ladders of mortgage payments and the Lotas eaters who don't actually see me I'm a robot nonexistent to these people really high-rise has lots in common with the Time Machine in the class warfare could eventually lead to cannibalism with the Morlock working class eating the rich.
Ok, I admit it, I never noticed all the pools in his writing.
To my knowledge, this essay is the only complete survey of the Ballardian swimming pool.
@@DamienWalter I´m glad someone finally did it! Are you familiar with the movie The Swimmer (1968) in which Burt Lancaster decides to swim through all the swimmingpools of his neighbours? He decides that his neighbours pools form a river he could swim to back his house. As he returns to his own house he finds the house empty and overgrown. It´s super-Ballardian!
@@stellaVistaI love that movie. We need a reboot with J G Ballard living in one of the houses.
Top, I like his words. Thanks
He was a Late Romantic Decadent, the sci-fi label is absolutely absurd. Could anything be more Freudian than a fixation of pools, a regressive longing for the long lost womb? His stories are prose poems of absolute regression, but the Arcadia he luxuriates in is a dead city, a forest of fallen columns overrun by
lizards and poison poppies, but he trivializes it with that same brand of Rousseauism reborn in the postwar generation of the Sixties. His regressive Xanadu of the wrecked high-rise laughably ends in some kind of Robert Bly fantasy of ME TARZAN, YOU JANE postcard from the edge.
None of this anything new either. In William Blake's “London,” institutions, symbolized by church and palace, oppress individuals. Their impersonal walls are deaf to the chimney sweep’s cry and soldier’s sigh same as Ballard's traffic jam prisoners. For Blake as with Ballard, buildings are society’s face, abstract, mechanical, lifeless. “London” has a radical new way of seeing grand works of urban architecture as blank, sinister
monoliths. Blake prefigures Baudelaire and Kafka in his vision of the dead night-world of the modern city, today Ballard's arid grid of glass and concrete. His novels are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist.
Whatever you prompted the AI it worked.
I like this video, but that film high rise was not good. Style over substance.