Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A - JG Ballard / The Magic of Ju-Ju skull connection - Archie Shepp / Burroughs' cut-ups and concrete poetry

 

Continuing the JG Ballard theme (see last post), here's a Christmas present...from me to me - ha! Well, I swear it was comparatively cheap by at least £100, so I treated myself to this 1972 Grove Press first American edition. OK, it doesn't have the annotations by Ballard included in the Flamingo 2001 paperback but...look at that cover! Plus, it a hardback...it's a lovely size...it's so good-looking! You can over-indulgence in food at Christmas, but never books.

The painted skull by Alan Winston used for Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A. was also used five years earlier for Archie Shepp's album, The Magic Of Ju-Ju. Winston isn't credited in the book. I don't know about the album. I used to have it on vinyl but it went years ago, along with many others I've sold. Once upon a time I listened to a lot of Free Jazz and the title track of the album certainly is 'free'. But gradually I listened to it less until it then got to the stage where I joined the common listener in finding it bloody annoying! I'll dip in now and again, these days, but generally you could say my taste in Jazz has got more 'conservative'. 

When it comes to literature though, I suppose my taste is...'radical' (?), alongside genre fiction. Ballard's novel would certainly be considered radical amongst most people and The Atrocity Exhibition (it's UK title) his most adventurous work regarding structure. 

Ballard was a big fan of William Burroughs, as I'm sure you know. I see a connection between Burroughs' cut-up novels and concrete poetry when it comes to disrupting structures of 'normal' poetry and text generally to shape new images, new ideas and ways of looking at words and letters. A connection can also be made between Eduardo Paolozzi's 'sampled' texts and Burroughs, then to The Independent Group (of which Paolozzi was a member) and their influence on Ballard. That whole 'scene' inspires me greatly, from This Is Tomorrow to Abba Zaba, Moorcock's New Worlds magazine and British art in the 60s. 

Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds: Science Fiction and Art in the Sixties is highly recommended. The best place to buy it is here.

TTFN

Book: The Illuminated Man - Life, Death And The Worlds Of JG Ballard

 

RTomens, 2025

The actual book, The Illuminated Man - Life, Death And The Worlds Of JG Ballard, is due in April, published by Bloomsbury. This isn't the actual cover though. I got it into my head to create one. Don't ask me why. It was something to do this afternoon. There's much excitement over the book in the Ballard community, especially since Priest was also a highly regarded writer of speculative fiction and knew many others who were part of the 'New Wave' of UK 'science-fiction' in the 60s.  

JG Ballard: First Edition Berkley Medallion Books - Financial Concern button switched off!

 

Suddenly, for some reason, money didn't matter.

Something clicked.

It was my Financial Concern button, which I changed from 'On', as it usually is, to 'Off'.

Having done so, I began buying books.

I bought as if it might all end next week. As if a comet large enough to smash the planet to smithereens was on course to do so and no amount of action by either superpower could do anything about it. 

There are no pockets in a shroud, right?

Not that the Ballard books pictured were expensive (that's relative, isn't it?). They were actually cheaper as a job lot than any others I'd seen online. Cheaper individually, that is. A friends asked 'But you have them, don't you?' Meaning the stories. Yes, I do, but as any book-lover knows, sometimes it's about the editions. I am not, mind you, an obsessive collector of editions. But I couldn't resist these.

With the FC button still switched off, I proceeded to scour the internet and found several more books. I may show them to you in the future.

I also struck a deal with a book dealer via email. 

I was high on buying.

Now I'm flying nearly every day as I eagerly await the post. High too on having so many great new books and magazines to explore.

The FC button has been switched on again. It must, after all, remain on by default, otherwise I'd be broke.

I can browse charity shop shelves with the FC button on, no worries, since nothing costs more than £3, usually.

Online however, as you know, is an endless shop stuffed with goodies. It's where you can usually find  what you're after but the price...oh the prices!...can sometimes be far too much.

For now I'm being 'good'. 

Print: Something Happened / JG Ballard paperbacks and judging books by their covers

 

RTomens, 2024

There's somethin' happenin' here...what it is ain't exactly clear...

*

I have the complete JG Ballard short stories in two volumes but recently previous collections from the 70s have become incredibly appealing. First off, obviously they're attractive as items, as books that appeared at the time, being of their time, being what people would have read, how they would have read Ballard way back then. Secondly, I like slimmer books; ones that fit neatly into a pocket. Thirdly, the artwork interests me. 

So I got lucky in the week, coming across these three on one sci-fi shelf of an Oxfam shop. Usually the sci-fi sections disappoint me, lined as they are with big fantasy novels such as Game of Conquest Vols 3, 5 and 6. I heard someone else complain the other day that Fantasy is what's big these days. I wouldn't know, but it makes sense. How 'big' sci-fi is in terms of sales, I've no idea. I don't read contemporary sci-fi. Perhaps I should. Perhaps I should listen to more contemporary music and watch more contemporary films...and Art...and whatever.

The greatest artwork to ever grace a Ballard paperback has to be by David Pelham...

...that's one of several he did. He seemed to totally 'get' Ballard, which is no surprise since he got to know him through Eduardo Paolozzi, thus joining the inner sanctum, the righteous brotherhood of  post-New Wave lit/Pop Art in Britain. It was Ballard who insisted Pelham should produce the artwork for his books. Was England not the coolest place on earth during the 60s Art/New Wave (sci-fi) revolution? Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine, Ambit, Ballard, Paolozzi etc? I think so. And Ballard, like one of his literary heroes, William Burroughs, looked nothing like 'cool'. If WSB looked like a Southern gentlemen, Jim looked decidedly English conservative, very suburban. Also like Burroughs, he was older than the hip youngsters around him. They were never going to give up their sensible clothing for t-shirts and denim. No beards either. Yet, both inspire(d) generations to come through their writing. Here I am, judging books by their covers but metaphorically-speaking, it isn't always wise.

TTFN  

Art: Post-Industrial / What ChatGPT says about me / Demdike Stare revival / Ballardian boat of the Drowned World

 

RTomens, 2024

*

'who is robin tomens?'

Robin Tomens is an author, music enthusiast, and blogger known for his work related to jazz music and record collecting. He has written books such as "Waltz in Time," which explore various aspects of music and culture. Additionally, Robin Tomens runs a blog called "Inconstant Sol," where he shares insights and reviews about jazz albums, including rare and obscure recordings, often delving into their historical context and significance. His contributions have made him a respected figure among jazz aficionados and collectors.'

A friend sent me the above, created by ChatGPT. I don't fear AI. It made me laugh. People assume fear drives a dislike of AI, as if those of us yet to be enthralled by it cower at the prospect of it taking over. Future scenario: AI is used to infiltrate the military industrial complex to such a degree that those controlling input can no longer stop the results, or alter them. AI creates wars which destroy the world. Somebody must have written that as fiction, surely.

How ChatGPT describes me is wrong anyway. Where does it get its false information? It names a book I haven't written and a blog I never wrote. I am certainly not 'a respected figure among jazz aficionados and collectors', despite having written this. More likely, because I wrote that.

*

Ten years after my book was published, Demdike Stare released Tryptych. I mention it only because there's a Demdike Stare revival gathering pace...in my room...just because they came to mind, for some unknown reason...so I played Tryptych and was surprised at how good it still sounded...almost as good as when Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker seemed to rule the kingdom of 'hauntology'...they were so hip (ugh)...Mancunians from the murky North...a post-industrial landscape littered with the ruins of factories, crumpled pylons, rusting power generators...rubble...constant rain feeding giant weeds that burst through pavement cracks to thread themselves through smashed windows towards light that's never quite strong enough...in the new garden of evil...

They wouldn't thank me for suggesting they're finished. They're not. In January this year they released Sustain: FForward, a 'mixtape' merging all manner of beats and samples. But for my money, it's not as impressive as their Testpressing series, 2013 to 2015. 

*

Talking of rampant foliage in the post-industrial world...the Drowned World, whilst walking around Chatham Docks this week I came across this...

...very Ballardian, eh?

TTFN

Books: Aircraft - Le Corbusier / The Unlimited Dream Company - J. G. Ballard / Aircraft coincidences

 

I can't say for sure that Corbusier started it. Or I could. It would be a more interesting opening sentence: 'Le Corbusier started it!', but you know as well as I do that he couldn't 'start' anything. Hold on...

It could be said that Le Corbusier's book, Aircraft, started something....I suppose. Start again...

It started when I pulled Le Corbusier's Aircraft out from whatever it was wedged between and stuck it on display. What started? You'll see...

I was struck by how beautiful the cover is...how simple, direct, clear, graphically. Anyway, a few days later I'm browsing the basement of a West End bookshop when I come across The Unlimited Dream Company by J. G. Ballard, wondering 'Do I have this? I must have this...perhaps I don't.' I bought it. Luckily, no other edition lurked on the shelves. I couldn't believe it had escaped 'the net'. It had also escaped my memory, which is full of holes, big holes, like the most useless net imaginable.

Turns out it's one of the wildest books Ballard has ever written and yes that includes Crash. When Blake crashes his plane in the Thames at Shepperton it begins a series of fantastical events as Blake, being dead/not dead, discovers he has amazing powers and rampant desires. He transforms the environment completely. I'll say no more for fear of ruining your enjoyment. 

So I went from Aircraft to Blake's aircraft crashing, quite by coincidence. I'm sure Ballard was aware of Le Corbusier's book. Maybe not. 

As I neared the end of Ballard's novel we decided to go for a day out at Shoreham-by-Sea. LJ chose the place. It's an enjoyable little town on a river over which there's a bridge leading to the sea. We walked the other side of the river, heading West, over the road and into the countryside, following the Adur. Guess what was to our left...an airport for light aircraft. We stood and watched a few taking off and landing. I was mesmerised, partly thinking of Ballard's character, Blake, but also by the sight of people brave enough to fly. 

The airport (Brighton City Airport) terminal is a thing of beauty in itself, opened in 1936, a year after Le Corbusier's book was published. From the elegance of Aircraft to the sight of this Art Deco gem seemed like an appropriate way to end the recent flight theme in my life. 

Book: Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 - J. G. Ballard

 

A new book of Ballard's non-fiction! 

But don't you already have A User’s Guide to the Millennium? 

Yes. 

Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 contains more, though. 

Like what? 

I don't know.

It's like a new box set of your favourite pop star featuring bonus tracks...only there's no barrel scraping equivalent of 'Born To Run' (Take 5, incomplete).

No, I know Bruce Springsteen isn't your favourite pop star but you get my point.

Ballard never wrote about music, as far as I know. Perhaps it wasn't as important to him as Surrealist art or William Burroughs. Still, if forced to imagine him listening to anything I would suggest Classical music playing quietly in the background whilst he conjures up beach scenes in dream landscapes (Debussy?) or Trad Jazz (quietly) as old-time nostalgia for an age he never knew. 

Really, ideally, placing him at the birth of the Independent Group as a new sci-fi short story writer in the mid-50s the soundtrack should be Modern Jazz but he wasn't that hip. Like William Burroughs, he always looked like a businessman, a square from the suburbs, a conformist. That's the best disguise for a radical writer, ensuring nobody in the street will suspect and start asking questions. Shh...

Although he didn't write about music bands such as Joy Division,
The Normal and Cabaret Voltaire were undoubtedly influenced by him. Others too, no doubt, but not Gary Numan just because he wrote a song called Cars. Surely. But I don't know. Perhaps Gary new Ballard inside out.

Without having read all of this book I can say a highlight is his review of How To Achieve Sexual Ecstasy from 1969. He recommends the book, despite describing it as '...a nostalgic hymn to a kind of sexual garden of Eden' which fails to chime with looser attitudes of the day. 

One thing's for sure, no matter how times and attitudes change, Ballard's writing will never feel outdated.

Zodiac 2000 by J.G.Ballard for Ambit magazine, 1978

J.G.Ballard transforms the traditional zodiac symbols into 'contemporary' ones and accompanies each with his own brilliant text. Mine, by the way, sees the goat replaced with a vibrator - heh-heh.

 

England Swings SF - Judith Merril (ed) / Press reactions to JG Ballard

 

Remember Swinging England? Of course you don't, you probably weren't even born. Still, you have this time machine with which to read all about the decade (perhaps more accurately, the first half of the decade?) when England was the epicentre of Cool. Exactly when England was officially designated the most swinging place in the world, I'm not sure.

There was an attempt to revive the idea in the 90s when Blur and Oasis went head-to-head but they didn't have a chance in hell against the likes of The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks or The Small Faces, did they? Never mind that Cool Britannia under Tony Blair was a superficial gloss, thinly applied, easily seen through compared to the mass of talent in music, film, fashion and art that came to the fore three decades earlier.

So here is England Swings SF with a jacket design by Richard Merkin, who became friends with Peter Blake and through Blake's cover for Sgt. Pepper was immortalised as one of the collaged crowd on the sleeve. Coincidentally, Merril interspersed her intro with lyrics from St. Pepper. 

I bought this hardback, first edition recently, preferring it to the inferior paperback cover. You know, sometimes you have to have certain editions and although I'm not normally driven to pay more just for the cover, this time I did. Note the derogatory remarks regarding New Wave sci-fi from some big names on the back. I could be a bit derogatory by suggesting that England had stopped swinging by the time of the book's publication date, 1968. But what kind of killjoy would deny Judith her right to exploit the idea and produce a late-Pop Art/Lit masterpiece in the process? 

The cover is reminiscent of the work Paolozzi was producing as prints; the juxtaposition of photography and graphic art in collage form, much like illustrations that would grace the pages of New Worlds magazine in the hands of Michael Moorcock as editor. 

Three JG Ballard stories feature and as a bonus press reactions to Ballard in another hot magazine of the day, Ambit, are included. I've scanned them and stuck them together for you to read.

I haven't started to read any of the stories yet. For now it just sits facing out on the bookshelf, looking magnificent.

Ambit Magazine: The Invisible Years - J.G. Ballard, Martin Bax & Ronald Sandford

From Ambit 78 (1979), text by J.G.Ballard and Martin Bax. Illustration/collage by Ronald Sandford.

Scrubbing the floor with Stevie Wonder & Sci-Fi Innversions with JG Ballard and Co.

(...................(hold on).....did you imagine a new post today that is not this one? Or did I imagine it; the one that repeated a theme discussed earlier? If so, either you are going mad...or I am...)

I've been busy today - creating images and (far more usefully) scrubbing the tiled floor in the hallway, which I can never do without singing (in my head) a line from Stevie Wonder's Living For The City: 'to scrub the floors for many'. This is totally absurd, I know, since the song is about the struggles of black people in America and I am a white man in London scrubbing the floor only for myself and the missus.

If, as impossible as it sounds to me, you didn't know that tune, I will feel my day has not been wasted by introducing you to a track from one of the greatest albums ever made, Innervisions.

From one kind of innervisions to those of Britain's New Wave sci-fi writers in the 60s as discussed in Colin Greenland's The Entropy Exhibition, which I've just started reading. The talk then was of 'inner space', that vast psychic universe in which the master, JG Ballard and others found so much material. This in opposition to cliched pulp adventures in outer space which amounted to no more than ripping yarns with aliens. Not that all outer space sci-novels were rubbish, of course, but that this breed set out to suggest and describe new possibilities for the genre; mapping the altered mind, if I may call it that. They had their work cut out. Ultimately, they may have failed since only the more discerning cognoscenti see worlds other than strange alien planets when thinking of science fiction. No matter. We cannot concern ourselves with what Mr & Mrs People think, can we?  

Talking of sci-fi novels, the one featured in the photo at the top provided the material for this...

...I haven't read the book...simply used it.

Ballard's Drowned World and Aquatic Art / Drexciya - Aquatic Bata Particles

Untitled, RTomens, 2018

One thing leads to another...have you noticed? Book-hunting for material the other day I came across this...

...nothing quite excites me like finding good source material, or in this case, material with potential, because photos of undersea creatures aren't no.1 on my source wants list. Mind you, no subject is, really, because as you collagists know, anything can be used in surprising ways to create good images.

Having bagged the book, the next day I set about looking for ways to use what's in it and the first piece here was the result. I then seemed to develop an 'aquatic' mindset and what better novel to suit it than JG Ballard's The Drowned World, which I hadn't read for a long time. As I discussed regarding films, late appreciation can be a good thing. In this case, it may not be a new discovery, but it feels like reading it anew with eyes that are decades older than when they first scanned the text.

It was re-reading The Drowned World that inspired this second piece, which also utilises a photo from the newly-acquired book. I confess that the undersea element didn't quite work as I wanted it to, yet a few days later I've grown accustomed to it's ghostly presence rather than the clearer one I wished for.

Submerged Memory, RTomens, 2018

That's all for now. Thanks for dropping by. I'll leave you with some aquatic techno via Detroit...

J.G.Ballard & Eduardo Paolozzi (interview/influence) / Concentration City print

Paolozzi & Ballard - two giants of the UK's art/literary scene - yes, you know - so I was thinking about them today in relation to reading Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G.Ballard 1967-2008. It's a great collection which features a discussion between Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi and Frank Whitford from 1971. You can read it here.

Growing out of and influenced by (in the case of Ballard) the UK's 50s scene of Pop/Science hybridisation (This Is Tomorrow) they contributed to/worked for Ambit magazine and became friends. Both felt the effects of Surrealism and if Ballard's suburban brand showed obvious signs Paolozzi's was, perhaps, more subtle, yet in his hybrid sculptures and image juxtapositions, like Ballards inner space landscapes, do somehow bear the marks of Parisian dreamworld experiments of the 30s. 

The flip side to all that hippy excess of the 60s Ballard, like Burroughs in America, was a rebel in straight clothing, offering his own alternate visions whilst maintaining an entirely respectable demeanour. Nice middle-class man. Well-spoken but capable of an extreme literary shock such as Crash.

I've used a few of Ballard's short story titles for my art. Here, for instance, is a print called Concentration City, landscaped here whereas the original was portrait..

You can look at Ballard's classic text/image collage in New Worlds magazine on my other blog here