loosing my ballardian virginity (part two)

i felt like an atheist touring a church, like a skeptic lured by an outlandish cult, on verge of giving in. ballard’s work, his style, his writing, his contributions themselves became irrelevant. it was his obsessions, his morbid lucidity, his flair for shocking and rocking that were on display. the autopsy show is a lesson in fetishism –the author as a substitute pop totem.





the show turned to showmanship in the “pornography and technology” room, which very much looked like a crossbred between bride of frankenstein and a cheap xxx film with a visit to the dentist theme. you had these creepy operation tables with pictures of car-wrecks. you had cronenberg’s crash playing. you had a letter report about wanting to fuck ronald reagan. you had joy-of-(twisted)-sex-style documentaries from the seventies, and a huge video pastiche of clinical, endoscopic porn.




i moved on from the awkward and fleshy to the cold, pasteurized “asepsis and neobarbarism” section. here the layout was more basic: a couple of digital signs hanging from the roof, again, with fragments of text that, unless you’d actually read whatever book they were from, one couldn’t really make sense out of. then four or five screens showing the shoddy 3D promos for hypothetic luxury developments that have become the staple of post-dubai urban marketing. “only injections of violence can disrupt the lethargy and make a new utopia possible,” read the little tag for the room. but isn’t that what all these new developments are about, spoonfuls of sugared violence? isn’t dystopia the new utopia?




the last part of the exhibition is a series of rooms that basically amount to the church of jgb. first off, a “reading room,” or all you can eat buffet, with a neat encased row of first editions—like the plastic foodclones on display in low-grade japanese restaurants—dominating the tables stashed with library copies that visitors can flip through. even though this was the perfect chance for me to at least read a paragraph of ballard, i avoided the books and just kept moving. i really like the idea of reading rooms in exhibitions, but not once have i seen anyone actually taking the time to sit down and read anything. let alone a novel.




the ballardly altar room was my favorite of them all. it was presided over by a fragment of the unlimited dream company, a 1983 film by sam scoggings, were ballard is asaulted with 90 two-second questions from eyckman’s personality quotient. do you enjoy meeting new people? are your feelings easily hurt? do you often feel fed up? do you enjoy hurting the people you love? would you call yourself a nervous person? Are you a warrior? do you worry about awful things that might happen? do people who drive carefully annoy you? as the postmodern inquisitional trial unfolds, the camera zooms into ballard, till you can see the sweat on his forehead and his eye looks like a fly trapped in a jar. in the context of the exhibition, the film feels like a contemporary relic of sorts, digital cartilage stripped from the ominous saint.



the show closes with visual epistles of ballardian apostles. a full iconography can be drawn from the black and white pictures of ana barrado, or from the barrage of michel lord’s future ruins series. the preaching of the word is present in the bits of ballardian techno-following (the ballardian blog, jgb groupie homevideos playing on cellphones).





the autopsy reveals the voice of this man that lives in a world that can’t believe anymore, but doesn’t know how to stop believing.

loosing my ballardian virginity (part one)

having never opened a j.g. ballard book in my life, it seems terribly inadequate that i cover and review the very first exhibition dedicated exclusively to his life and work. still, adequacy has never been my forte, and after being seduced by the show’s promotional poster planted right in front of the door to my building—“crec en res,” it read, I believe in nothing—i decided to go to the cccb and see what all the fuss was about.




upon entering the exhibition, i found myself sucked into this darkened, blue neon nothing. it was a little disorienting. there was probably an opening statement and bio pasted on the wall, but i skipped it and decided to make my first time as visceral and uninformed as possible. after a boring strand of interviews with writers on the subject of ballard, and a terribly anticlimatic “conceptual” “videoart” piece (very barcelona. if there is one thing i hate about the culture scene here is that it's overstuffed and heavily subsidized, meaning that practically anyone with decent connections and a catalan pedigree can show his or her crap in even the more established museums and galleries.) the show actually began setting its pace.




a striking ballardian background room featured a caged “inside” collection of mementos and minute watercolors of the lunghua internment camp where ballard and his family were detained during ww2. at the end of the room ran a projection of the bbc documentary home, where ballard return to the camp in the early 2000s. on the “outside” half of the room, behind a wooden pallet divisory wall, are eerie black and white snapshots of wartime shanghai. the overall effect of the room is subtle and shattering, a very effective way of exposing the roots of ballardian spirit.





soon enough, it struck me i really wasn’t as ballardly vestal as i thought. even though i’ve never had a go at j.g. himself—i’m still not sure why—i realized that a certain ballardian sensibility had penetrated my development early on, that it was very much a part of my pop upbringing. from the re-run of the empire of the sun movie—which impressed me as a kid, and might have led to some preemptive crush on christian bale—to the melted cheese aesthetics of stop-motion sci-fi and illustrated pulp, i began to fathom the idea of a non-ballard-reading ballardian…




to be continued

méxico lindo

paul outerbridge, travel agent, mazatlán, mexico, c.1950
via loudpaper

xxx

we've hit tropical mode in barcelona. people are half-naked on the street. men wear mustaches and nylon shortshorts. protoqueer emotions of my childhood in southern california c.1984 all over again. i am sweaty and dizzy. i miss the cool rainy summer nights in mexico city.

rainbowbrite

my first barcelona rainbow (over the rooftops)
.
.
.
. . . . faggoty-ass post

vacío

today is empty

cavity

barcelona is full of cavities. i love the weary industrial remains of poble nou or poble sec, the empty, windowless weddingcake castles of older parts of the eixample. even though the city pains itself in presenting a dazzling and sophisticated face for tourists and urban consumers (formerly known as citizens), barcerlona can't really help herself from exposing her dirty bottom every now and then. i love the for sale signs popping up everywhere like bad weeds, hinting at the housing crisis that should sooner or later have spain by the balls. i love the failed attempts at wiping the naughty away in sake of tourists (the raval, or the little "forest" in glòries that still caters to midnight–even midday–cruisers in search of a quick fix, despite being right next to nouvel's cucumber)(actually, it probably serves as inspiration to do the nasty). i love the after-tourist dawns down the ramblas or the gótico, with the day's refuse piling up, and the fresh stench of piss and guts.

darwin

i saw a seagull kill and eat a pigeon this afternoon

roadkill

last week two women were (simultaneously) run over by a car and a motorcycle in front of my apartment building. it was the third accident of this kind in the last two months that i've witnessed from my balcony. the city has responded by spraypainting warnings at the points of crossing:

in barcelona, one out of three traffic-related deaths is a walker. attention! we are all on the road!

so now, it turns out, we who are carless should be particularly careful with the crazy fucks who actually have cars but are pretty much careless. why don't they spray these big ass signs on hoods?

forum

in barcelona, weekends in may are starburst colored. perfect for fun in the sun. i hate the beaches here though. they're dusty, the sand is more like dry mud than sand, it cakes on your skin like a fake suntan, the ocean is gooey and smelly, and everywhere is full of drunken redfaced fatties who flew in from midlands. the beach i despise less here is the forum, because there is no beach. only concrete slabs that dip straight into the ocean. no tourists here either: only tight pubescent moroccans or gypsies from la mina (the projects), swimming, diving and stealing wallets in their underwear.

escalate

i love the open-air escalators that climb the hills of barcelona.

this morning on the escalator, i smelled the following sequence:

1. cat piss
2. new grass
3. chemically treated water
4. pot roast
5. pigeon shit
6. old lady
7. spring