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

easy-bake

"the culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. the promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. in front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape."

adorno @ marxists.org

toppings 11 : london 2027

ok, it was an admittedly bad choice of film for close-to-bedtime-cuddling, and it made me so nervous i had a tough time sleeping. but in my book, that’s a definite plus for any movie. i'm talking about the dynamic, supersaturated dystopian pastiche of alfonso cuarón’s children of men, a “political thriller.” a sort of weak and ultimately cheesy plot, a touch of sentimentalism, big fx, beastishly charismatic leading hunk, damsel in serious distress…all you could expect from your average action flick. still, this isn’t your average anything. the movie’s surface is stunning because it’s imbued with gut-reference and style dictates you could expect from a poetic incursion into the process of meat-packing, for instance.

after the film i felt queasy, and my neck ached. even though there’s a lot of blood spattered around (in a particularly sequence, some of it gets on the camera lens, and stays there for a couple of minutes), the toughest thing to take in isn’t the gore, but the overwhelming resonance of the violence, abuse, barren consumption and forlorn everydayness portrayed, in perfect accord with present-day conditions. 2027 doesn’t seem that far away, and that’s what makes it scary.

if you haven’t seen the film, you have to, i don't want to start spoiling. if you’re an architect and haven’t seen the film, you have to, twice at least.

don’t bother with trying out the storyline. just take in the clues between the lines (or the frames, or whatever). the scene is london on the verge of meltdown. see what the professional future might have in store for you. maybe it already does. shady extra-legal government detention camps (ceuta or abu grhaib or guantánamo ring a bell?), wildcat , street-warfare (beirut? ghaza? baghdad?), anti-terrorist checkpoints, spiritual junkies, narcotic media control, corporate grays, consumer depression, radical identity politics, spatial exclusion, and the end of public things. cuarón’s london 2027 is a condensed, scaled and exacerbated simulacrum of the world we live in, now.

the film grips. a review quotes the director saying: “we cannot afford one single frame without a comment on the state of things…the story of this movie is just the coat hanger. what's important is the fabric that you're going to hang.” architects should take note. in fact, a fair share of sting in the movie heads straight for our crowd of “creatives”, designers, artsy types and yes, gulp, architects. here are the modern contemporaries (los modernillos), dining in an appropriately herzog&demeuronesque set staged in the belly of the battersea power station, dubbed the “ark of the arts.” the guy who runs the place is clad in black, sipping wine, probably gay, and all-in-all uncomfortably architecty. he spends his money and time rescuing artistic treasures from around the rotten globe. then he hangs them on white walls as a backdrop to his meaningless life. he too has lost hope, but decides to live on for taste and refinement, like others in the film choose guns or tai-chi or dogs or strong pot. why, the hero asks, choose art, when there won’t be anyone left to look or care? what’s the point? more precisely, what's the justification? the artsy type's demolishing cameo-closing response should sound strangely familiar. you just have to avoid thinking about it.

touring the bush (10) : brasilia vs curtiba, now

the sun is out, sheep are trimming the lawns, as usual. they are watched by gardeners-turned-shepherds. instead of the constant jerky grumble and oily stink of mechanical mowers, you get the occasional bleat and the considerably gentler whiff of ruminant droppings. yes, mother nature’s little croppers are also excellent providers of fertilizer. when the time is right, the sheep are shorn to make blankets for the poor.

this is not a chapter in a precious moments my first good christian going green guide. this is brazil. yes, the same country you saw in all those movies with kids being shot in the head for stealing a candy or sold for organ adoption. but that’s rio, or sao paulo, this is curitiba.



ok, it sounds a little off. it probably is. yes, it is a little christian, this whole garden-as-a-little-piece-of-paradise-on-earth thing. yes, it is a tad populist, this spoonful-of-sugar planning. but somehow it’s working. 98% of the people who live here say they wouldn’t prefer living anywhere else.

besides, it’s not just sheep and lawns. there is a highly participative city-wide recycling program, and people who live up in hard-to-get-to favelas and bring down their trash to be collected get food or bus tokens for their contribution and effort through a “green exchange” program. social-service themed buses tour the city teaching clean water conservation or offering p.e. to poor kids. there is fifty square meters of green area per inhabitant, compared to the recommended twelve of international standards.



institutional innovations include the “lighthouses of knowledge” learning spots, a decentralized and easy-access network of city service branches known as “citizenship streets” and the open university for the environment. city-funded day care, tree-planting initiatives, conscious industrial regulations, recreational activities, auto-construction assistance, infrastructure conversion…all this is part of curitiba’s successful city-building.



brasília, on the other hand, despite its unesco world-heritage status and all its poured concrete greatness, remains an uncomfortable testimony to the contradictions of city planning solely in the service of (state) power. lonely planet sums it up like this: "though it probably looked good on paper and still looks good in photos, in the flesh it's another story." the city center is soulless, a precious collection of government buildings. the city's alternative to a pedestrian scale is walking long, dry and hot distances. it isn't rare when someone is run-over trying to cross a superhighway. an expensive metro system still remains unfinished. poor residents are located in faraway "satellite" towns, championing in higher-than-average sprawl-induced depression. infrastructural maintenance is poor and costly. people with moyens spend their weekends in sao paulo or rio.



the city is detached and limited. like a hollow idea. or as someone else puts it, "a photogenic myth".



next stop: caracas (it's gonna be bueno)