About the Book
A collection of never-before-published interviews, by the author of "Cocaine Nights" (Flamingo), "Crash" (Vintage), and "Millennium People" (Flamingo). It presents thoughts on the Internet and virtual reality, the impact of 9-11, extremism, the media industries, the meaning of Las Vegas and gated communities, and the infantilization of America and the world. This new volume of interviews from RE/Search shows Ballard whole - a moralist, standing at the intersection between Jonathan Swift and Salvador Dali. Over four decades Ballard has exerted a deep influence over diverse writers like Angela Carter, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Houellebecq and Don DeLillo. His Booker Prize-nominated "Empire of the Sun" was filmed by Steven Spielberg. Never has Ballard sounded so concerned, fatherly, or political. (In an earlier, 1984 RE/Search interview, Ballard impishly exclaims, "I want more nuclear weapons!") The interviews make it abundantly clear that while Ballard has always proclaimed the death of reason and the visceral origins of technology, he now sees these developments as almost wholly negative.
"What bothers me," the author says of that notorious techno-pornographic novel "Crash," "is that something is happening that you could almost call the 'Normalizing of the Psychopathic' - the greater and greater areas of what used to be regarded as the psychopathic by, say, my parents." It doesn't seem to occur to Ballard that anyone might have read his violently sexual stories literally.
About the Author :
J.G. Ballard: Born in Shanghai November 15, 1930, James Graham Ballard
spent the first 15 years of his life in China. Interned in a Japanese camp
during World War II, he was repatriated to England at the age of sixteen. After
studying medicine at Cambridge, he sold his first "speculative fiction" story
to New Worlds in 1956 and began writing a series of planetary disaster
novels, ultimately focusing on the inner landscape in psychopathological
classics such as Crash and High-Rise. In 1987 Steven Spielberg
made a movie of his best-selling autobiographical work, Empire of the Sun.
For the past 30 years J.G. Ballard has lived in Shepperton, England, home of
the famous film studios. {J.G. Ballard died April 19, 2009 in London, U.K.]
Mark Pauline is the founder of Survival Research Laboratories
(SRL) whose first show was in February 1979 in San Francisco's North Beach at
Alex's gas station. He has many SRL machine performance videos available on
YouTube, and is currently searching for a site to put on yet another show.
Around 1978 Mark Pauline, an Eckerd College, Florida
graduate and First Generation Punk Rock Original (he went to school with Exene
Cervenka, founder of X; Exene's sister Muriel; Pee-Wee Herman aka Paul Reubens;
and Punk Filmmaker Gordon Stevenson) moved to San Francisco. The abandoned
factories of the South of Market area, filled with rusting machinery, inspired
Mr. Pauline, an experienced welder and metal fabricator, to create an Art based
on the recycling of industrial technology. He incorporated a knowledge of
Futurism: the first Art Movement to extoll the beauty of speed, machines, and
war; and Dada/Surrealism, which championed the Absurd, Black Humor, the
Imagination and the Dream. Mr. Pauline has cited Raymond Rousssel's two books, Impressions
of Africa and Locus Solus, as being particularly inspiring.
Almost singlehandedly a new darkly humorous and savage "Art
Genre" was created: MACHINE PERFORMANCE ART. Beyond creating mere "Art
Machines," Mr. Pauline deployed a kind of multi-dimensional "Maximalist"
spirit, generating as many metaphors and surprises as possible, while always
probing the boundaries of "freedom." Authoritarian/totalitarian conventions and
cliches are frequently lampooned in shows bearing titles such as "A Bitter
Message of Hopeless Grief." Tolerances of the Human Body are musingly tested
with smoke, fluids, loud explosions, rocket launchings, fiery blasts, acrid
smells and other phenomena, while one-of-a-kind Menacing Machine personalities
express themselves to the limits of their arcane functioning. State-of-the-art
technological innovations involving tele-robotics and computers are
incorporated into the continually evolving show productions, described as
modern-day Hieronymus Bosch landscapes. Many highly-skilled and unique artists/scientists
are drawn to collaborate in the realization of SRL projects.
The best Art is by nature prophetic, and the Machine Art
Performances of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) poetically illustrate the
psychopathological possibilities latent in modern technological innovation and
heavy industry fabrication. Every dream, after all, deserves its nightmare.
Fusing Art, Technology and a kind of Burroughsian/Ballardian sensibility, SRL
creates trail-blazing, uncompromising, fabulist Art which will impact far into
the future. And Mark Pauline has long been a J.G. Ballard fan, visiting the
visionary author and interviewing him in the 1980s. His interview appears for
the first time in J.G. Ballard Conversations. Mr. Pauline/SRL has also
been featured in Search & Destroy #11, the RE/Search #1-2-3
tabloids, the Industrial Culture Handbook, and Pranks.
Graeme Revell was born in New Zealand Oct 23, 1955. He
graduated from The University of Auckland with degrees in economics and
politics. A classically trained pianist and French horn player, he worked as a
regional planner in Australia and Indonesia and as an orderly in an Australian
psychiatric hospital.
Graeme Revell was a founder of SPK (Surgical Penis Klinik;
Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv; System Planning Korporation), a 70s
Industrial Music group, for which he sang, played keyboards and percussion.
Their single "In Flagrante Delicto" formed the basis for his first movie
soundtrack, Dead Calm, which won an Australian Film Institute award.
Since then he's composed almost a hundred soundtracks, including The Crow,
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, The Craft, The Basketball Diaries, Chinese Box,
and Sin City. He also composed for CSI: Miami.
A rare book collector, futurist, and tireless researcher
into the dark side of the human psyche, Graeme Revell/SPK has been featured in
the RE/Search #1-2-3 tabloids, the Industrial Culture Handbook,
RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, and most recently J.G. Ballard
Conversations. Over the past 23 years Mr. Revell has interviewed J.G.
Ballard several times for RE/Search.
