‘Ron Rice dedicated his life to making movies, even going so far as to sacrifice food, rent, and other basic living needs to bankroll his work. He put his life on the line for cinema — and fate ultimately caught up with him. At the age of 29, in 1964, he died from bronchial pneumonia while shooting footage in Mexico. And yet, with just a handful of rough-hewn and improvisatory films to his name, Rice is a seminal, if little seen, New York underground filmmaker from the 1960s.

‘In a way, Rice’s life and work eerily mirrors Jean Vigo’s. Like the French poetic realist filmmaker (who also died at 29), Rice made only four — including complete and incomplete — works. And like Vigo, these were irreverent, anarchic, and playful movies made outside of the film industry. Rice, however, crafted non-narratives from the scraps of film material that he could gather. He was an impoverished artist making impoverished art.

‘Rice’s first film, The Flower Thief (1960), finds him on the West Coast, specifically San Francisco. Not only is this a freeform film shapeshifting with every scene, but it is also a document of the thriving Beat movement happening in the North Beach neighborhood, featuring appearances by poet Bob Kaufman and Eric Nord, founder of the nightclub hungry i and bingo parlor-turned-hip coffee spot, the Gas House, as well as semi-employee of hangout spot Co-Existence Bagel Shop.

‘Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s “Pull My Daisy” (1959) is considered the ur-Beat film, even though it has a recognizable structure to it. The Flower Thief, on the other hand, is more in the vein of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” You simply don’t know what will happen next. It stars Taylor Mead, that sprightly nymph-like spirit of American underground cinema. Friend of kids, cats, and a teddy, but a thief of flowers, Mead ambles along busy streets, a smoke-filled café, and the ruins of an abandoned powerhouse, which are all scored to purpley-prose Beat poetry, jazz, and classical music.

‘Although The Flower Thief is firmly entrenched in the Beat milieu, with Rice’s use of fast- and slow-motion, it feels like a long-lost film from the silent era. Moreover, Mead, a fan of Chaplin and a friend of Stan Laurel, is akin to a silent comedian, performing with his whole body, his whole presence. He conveys a wondrous innocence with his lackadaisical demeanor and wobbly movements. His smile — which comes off joyful, elated, and ironic — is the smile of a knowing, naughty boy. So, a kind of doubling occurs when Mead stops to greet a gang of school kids seen through a chain-link fence — man-child meets actual children.

‘In Manhattan at the time, artists of various mediums got together, collaborated, and simply hung out. There wasn’t a “stay in your lane” mentality and of art disciplines being atomized. Jack Smith and his crew shot Normal Love (1963) in the day and cooled down at Rice’s flat at night. And it was during these visits that Rice shot the footage that would eventually become Chumlum. This 23-minute montage film uses in-camera superimpositions, saturated colors, the exotic veils and costumes of Smith and company, and the repetitive chords of the cimbalom (played by a pre-Velvet Underground Angus MacLise and engineered by minimalist composer Tony Conrad) to create a film of instant bliss and trance.

‘With The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, Rice returns to the rowdy improvisational approach of The Flower Thief, this time on the East Coast in a cramped apartment and on the streets of Manhattan. Winifred Bryan is the Queen of Sheba, while Mead plays the Atom Man spastically. It’s as if all of Mead’s appendages had a life of their own. Stiff, placing his forearms to his chest while rapidly moving his fingers and hands, he looks like the least intimidating T-Rex known to mankind. Smith makes a manic cameo during which Mead throws saltines (and what looks like glitter) into Smith’s gaping, gobbling bird-like mouth. It’s part and parcel of the Rice charm, the sense that he and his crew are making it up as they go along. Unfortunately, Rice never got to complete The Queen of Sheba, and it wasn’t until 1981 that viewers, the happy few, were finally exposed to his last creation. That year, Mead assembled the footage and scored it to a mishmash of jazz, top 40 pop tunes, and classical music.

‘If Rice’s work is little seen, the artists who were consciously or unconsciously influenced by him are not. The freeform, free-floating Rice raison d’être manifests in the orgiastic spectacles of Smith, the chilly genre riffs of Warhol, the live hang-out sessions of TV Party, the videos of Anton Perich, and the excessive video art of Ryan Trecartin. Rice and his descendants sketch out scenarios as nothing more than a container — and a leaky one at that — holding the constant shuffling and re-shuffling antics that ensue in their mercurial works.’ — Tanner Tafelski

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Stills

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Further

Ron Rice @ The Film-makers Coop
The Anarchic Movies of Ronald Rice
The Shooting-Star Cinema of Ron Rice
Book: ‘The Films of Ron Rice’
ron rice’s chumlum, with its soundtrack by angus maclise and tony conrad
“ASK ME SOME MORE QUESTIONS.”
Double Vision: Jean Vigo/Ron Rice
Ron Rice, il volo di Icaro
Ron Rice – MAKING LIGHT OF IT
10/23/13 Films of Ron Rice
Fred Camper on ‘The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man’
Ron Rice @ MUBI
Why New York Underground Film Festival and Ron Rice are similar

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Extras

Stolen Flowers (for Ron Rice)

Taylor Mead, The Lower East Side Biography Project

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Ephemera

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Ron Rice’s 5 films
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The Flower Thief (1960)
‘The Flower Thief is a 1960 underground film directed by Ron Rice, shot in 1959 in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, using surplus 16mm film. The film features non-professional actors like Taylor Mead and Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, and Beat poets living in North Beach such as Bob Kaufman. Skippy Alvarez, who worked at Vesuvio’s Bar and lived at The Swiss American Hotel, appears in the film. She had just returned from attempting to bail Bob Kaufman out of jail. She spoke about how she wished the North Beach police would leave the Beats alone & quit hassling them.’ — collaged

‘Starring Taylor Mead “In the old Hollywood days movie studios would keep a man on the set who, when all other sources of ideas failed (writers, directors, was called upon to ‘cook up’ something for filming. He was called The Wild Man. THE FLOWER THIEF has been put together in memory of all dead wild men who died unnoticed in the field of stunt.” – R.R.

‘Rice, by deliberately flouting established movie making traditions, reveals himself primarily as a professional rebel rather than the leader of a new movement. But in the highly specialized area of experimental films, he has produced a major work.’ — Eugene Archer, The New York Times.

the entirety

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‎Senseless (1962)
‘Consisting of a poetic stream of razor-sharp images, the overt content of SENSELESS portrays ecstatic travelers going to pot over the fantasies and pleasures of a trip to Mexico… highly effective cutting subtly interweaves the contrapuntal developement of themes of love and hate, peace and violence, beauty and destruction.’ — David Brooks

Watch the film here

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Chumlum (1964)
‘Chumlum is as close to cinematic mercury as aural-optical alchemy will allow: though hardly a “difficult” film, it’s extraordinarily elusive, almost impossible to keep in your cognitive or visual grasp. As it opens, someone seems to be frying ball-bearings in a velvet pan on the soundtrack: it’s future (and fleeting) Velvet Underground drummer Angus MacLise, assisted by recording engineer/minimalist-instrumentalist Tony Conrad, coaxing hypnotic shimmers from a hammered cimbalom. This roiling, panging sound seems immediately to trick time into vanishing: moments into the movie, we surrender to its synesthetic translucences, sounds within sounds, sight upon sights, no longer remembering when any of this began. The creator and “stars” of Normal Love (Smith, Mario Montez, Beverly Grant) laze around Rice’s loft, swaying, sashaying, but the more we attempt to distinguish what from who in each successive overlay of images interrupted by scrims and veils, the less distinguishable anything becomes. We might as well be thumbing through an oil-soaked stack of some hippie Scheherazade’s etchings: a thousand and one Lower East Side nights melting together in a cosmic slop of languid poses and limp half-dances, a smoke-fragile erotica that climaxes and dissolves the moment it hits your eye. “Toward the middle,” wrote P. Adams Sitney of Chumlum in his epochal Visionary Film, “[Rice] shows Jack Smith in an Arabian costume with a fake mustache, smoking hashish. The film becomes [Smith’s] reverie in which time is stretched or folded over itself.” Good shit, Sit, for indeed Chumlum does manage to capture with unnerving fidelity the murky glories, the sudden temps morts and temps mutant, not to mention the inevitable malaise of a rich but fading high.’ — Chuck Stephens

the entirety

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The Mexican Footage (1964)
‘When Ron Rice died, in Mexico, he left a dozen rolls of exposed film. This sample contains four rolls of beautiful color and black and white, shot in Mexico.’ — Jonas Mekas

Watch it here

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The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1982)
‘With Taylor Mead and Winifred Bryan. Photographed and directed by Ron Rice. Edited, from notes and memory, & musical score by Taylor Mead. Other performers: Judith Malina, Julian Beck, Jonas Mekas, Charles Rydell, Ed Sanders, Jack Smith, Jay Hoppe, Danny Dumbrowski, Will Guy, and friends. Titles by Bob Smith. Archival restoration by Anthology Film Archives, 1981/1982.

‘Ron Rice died before he had completed shooting the film. he had, however, put together a ‘fundraising version’ of the film. After his death, Howard Everngam, and old friend of Ron’s, according to his best knowledge of the filmmaker’s intentions, put together a version of the film which was available through the Film-Makers’ Cooperative until now. In 1979-82, using SHEBA materials deposited with Anthology Film Archives, and guiding himself by memory and notes made during the shooting, Taylor Mead prepared the present, definitive version of the film, and the soundtrack. The previous versions of the film–Everngam’s and Ron’s fund-raising versions are being preserved at Anthology for scholarly use.’ — Jonas Mekas.

Watch the film here

*

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I haven’t read ‘Running Wild’ so the question of whether you’re heretical or not is still out there. Yeah, a lot of people like Houellebecq, and that’s the truth. Universal Islands of Adventure is easily as great a park as any of the Disney ones down there. Your mom and David should get married or something. ** David Ehrenstein, I somehow didn’t know that you’re a Ballardian. Interesting. ** Bzzt, Hey there, Quinn! I’m, mm, good enough, I guess. I love ‘TAE’. I like his so-called urban trilogy — ‘Crash’, ‘Concrete Island’, ‘High Rise’. The other books of his I’ve read didn’t excite me so much. But he’s a very interesting guy. His interviews tend to be fascinating. Moving close to Manhattan is, of course, a great idea. It’s such a resource. Well, even though I think people think I’m prolific or something, I’m actually a very laborious, meticulous writer when it comes to fiction, so I’m in your camp. A lot of writers I most love take ages to publish new books: Joy Williams, obviously. We’re lucky if we get a new Robert Gluck book every fifteen years. Etc. The pressure to crank stuff out is just hot air, if you ask me. Obviously, as a non-MFA guy and as a reader of writers who are probably 90% non-MFA writers, I wouldn’t take that rejection hard at all. It’s probably a compliment, frankly. I love Artforum and Bookforum. Artforum was always my ultra-favorite place to write essays and reviews and articles for by far. If I ever write non-fiction again, it’ll be for Artforum, if they’ll have me. And I think Bookforum is the best venue for writing about books and writers, online or off, in the US, hands down. So you moving into that world is great news. Jennifer and David at Artforum are friends and great people, as is Michael Miller at Bookforum. Say hi for me if they’re the people you’re getting to know. Yes, I think my utter-seeming faith in being an artist is why I’ve done what I’ve done. That’s never wavered, I don’t know why, even when external forces suggested it should waver. I’m glad you like the ‘I Wished’ cover, thanks. Yes, I like it. I think you writing about Kier’s work for AF is a sterling idea, yes. He’s great. I don’t remember if you’ve seen ‘Permanent Green Light’, but the main character Roman is something of an artist and makes drawings throughout most of the film, and Kier did those drawings. Yes, Kier has been a DC’s community member for a long, long time. Given the uncertainty of the pandemic stuff, my summer is a question. Ideally, hopefully, I’ll be in SoCal a lot doing pre-production stuff for the film, which will be shot there. And, most ideally, making another trip to Japan at long, long last. The fundraising is in the early stages, but everything looks good at this point. I’ll take that sunny spring and wish you the very same. Take care, man. ** Dominik, Hi!!!! Yeah, the issue’s great, and I think it might be the very best one yet too! It’s true that they just get better and better. I don’t wear a hat, but it would be doffed and sweeping the floor at your feet. Ha ha, wow, that’s a wacky love, thank you. Love in the form of a slave I just found for the next post whose fetish is lying on the ground and having a man park a car with the tire crushing one of his hands and having the driver stay in the car and jack off and laugh at him while he screams, G. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Cool that you listened to that podcast. Is Crimp’s denouncing essay not online? Well, yeah, he and many other gay/AIDS activist types of that period thought that gay artists should subsume aesthetics and personal artistic aims to put their work in service of the gay community at large, and that message-based agit-prop art was the only legitimate art that gays should make. Happy you got your shot without hampering side effects. ** Jack Skelley, Jack! Any date that didn’t get hot and bothered by ‘Dead Ringers’ was clearly not the right gal for you, you crazy guy. I haven’t seen ‘A History of Violence’ and have long intended to. I’m on it. My kingdom for a Fun Zone! Love, me. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff, thanks. Uh, hm, off the top of my head that Ballard quote makes a certain amount of sense, but bending something to one’s own style’s will also sounds legitimate. All I know about the cover change for ‘I Wished’ is that Soho’s Editorial loved it but the marketing department ‘pushed back’ and so they changed it. Cool about the email/Skype! ** John Newton, Hi, John. I don’t think I’m a stressed or anxious person at all day to day, actually, but apparently I secretly am? Melatonin seems to be one of those substances that works for some and not for others. For me, it definitely works. I’m glad you liked ‘Horror Hospital Unplugged’. I’m very proud of it, but it’s rarely talked about. I’m totally good with Prep. I don’t take it myself, but I know a lot of people who do and have no problems whatsoever and consider it a godsend. French novels are my bread and butter. I don’t think I would even be a writer maybe if it wasn’t for French novels. Reading them when young is what made me who I am. I’ve read and like all of those French novels you mention. May your week similarly proceed with wonders galore attached. ** Brian, A Wednesday that makes your wildest dreams seem like waiting for a red light to turn green, Brian. ‘TAE’ is pretty fantastic. Add my yay and nooo to your respective yesterday occurrences. Christ, yeah, I wouldn’t know what to write about ‘Opening Night’. Urgh. It’s St. Patricks Day? I forgot. Did you guys chug-a-lug lagers and sing songs at the tops of your lungs or whatever celebrating Irish people do? Yes, the Pinault is on board for our event, signed off on the budget, etc., so that’s great. Otherwise, just some writing/fiddling and film stuff and blah blah. The filming of ‘Jerk’ starts today, so that might start eating my time, I’m not sure. I’ll be looking for sparkles. You too, yes? Green ones? ** Okay. I focus the blog’s attention du jour on another seminal filmmaker whose work is yet again severely under known due to the movie’s world self-destructive tendency to act like faux-daring and masturbatory stylishness constitute actual daring and vision. So I do my blog’s little part to counteract that, in the case of Ron Rice today. Check his stuff out. See you tomorrow.

‘In 1966, New Worlds, a British science fiction magazine edited by the writer Michael Moorcock, published a “condensed novel” by JG Ballard titled “The Assassination Weapon”. Moorcock was, he remembers, “delighted” to receive Ballard’s copy. “It was exactly what I’d been looking for and I demanded more. He complained I was making his eyes bleed, turning them out. For me it was exemplary, a flag to wave for authors and readers.” Later that same year New Worlds published “The Atrocity Exhibition”, which would become the title story of Ballard’s most notorious book.

‘In 1970 the American publisher Doubleday agreed to print an edition of Ballard’s condensed novels under that title. Marc Haefele, a young Doubleday editor at the time, remembers that a few weeks before publication, the company president was touring a warehouse in Virginia when the book was drawn to his attention. On the spot, he gave the order to pulp the entire print run. A British edition went ahead, but it wasn’t until 1972 that an American edition was published, under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA.

‘Whatever the guardians of public morality found so hard to stomach about The Atrocity Exhibition, it was surely more than dirty words and lèse-majesté. The novel presents fragments or avatars of a traumatised man, variously named Travis, Travers, Traven, Talbot or Talbert, who is conducting some kind of spun-out scientific experiment, which also takes the form of a lecture or media spectacle. Traven is both a researcher and an experimental subject or patient in an institution where white-coated medical science has become contaminated by other things: pornography, celebrity, the imminence of violent disaster. He is observed by one Dr Nathan and has a highly fetishised sexual relationship with Karen Novotny or Catherine Austin or Coma, names for a blank, damaged woman who often seems to be constructed from fragments of female celebrities – Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe.

‘The Atrocity Exhibition visits terrible violence on these female celebrity bodies, in the form of plane and car crashes, nuclear fallout, disasters of all kinds. Ronald Reagan and the car-safety campaigner Ralph Nader get the same treatment. The book’s obscenity, the reason it still has the potential to shock, is a function of its objectivity. It is clinical when, for decency’s sake, it ought to feign emotion. It looks on our sacred treasures, our culture’s real sacred treasures – the imaginary bodies of famous people – and responds with all the violence and lust and revulsion that the healthy well-adjusted citizen suppresses. Decency is what separates rational economic actors, dutifully maximising their personal benefit, from the racaille, from scum. It is the source of order. Ballard’s fictional refusal of it was – and remains – a threat.

‘Each section of The Atrocity Exhibition is a flight over the same apocalyptic landscape, a landscape that is also the human body, observed with a clinician’s eye as it undergoes trauma, as it is anatomised, penetrated, cut and crushed and humiliated, scorched and fucked. This body-landscape is also an image of itself, a mass-media projection made up of Hollywood movies and pornography and news footage of the Vietnam war. Living in the shadow of disaster, Travers is an exemplary modern subject. The only difference between him and the average suburbanite is that he doesn’t disguise his abjection. He is a burnt-out case, a celebrity stalker, a kind of psychological crash‑test dummy with a detached professional interest in the brick wall that’s about to make contact with his skull. He may, of course, also be insane.

‘The Atrocity Exhibition is a melancholy book, fixated on something terrible that it can’t let go. Its landscape is both dead and accelerating, a windblown desert strewn with the wreckage of modernity that is at the same time a place of unbearable speed and intensity. In 1964 Ballard’s wife Mary died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving him to bring up their three children alone. In 2007, when he was already terminally ill, I interviewed him. “I was terribly wounded by my wife’s death,” he told me. “Leaving me with these very young children, I felt that a crime had been committed by nature against this young woman – and her children – and I was searching desperately for an explanation … To some extent The Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to explain all the terrible violence that I saw around me in the early 60s. It wasn’t just the Kennedy assassination … I think I was trying to look for a kind of new logic that would explain all these events.”’ — A Useful Fiction

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Further

The Atrocity Exhibition @ goodreads
TAE @ A Useful Fiction
Rob Doyle on TAE
JG Ballard: five years on – a celebration
TAE @ Ballardian
TAE @ Conceptual Fiction
TAE @ mewsings
Piecing Together J. G. Ballard’s “The Atrocity Exhibition”
Disaffection and Abjection in J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition
Atrocity Exhibition Archive Paradoxe – Déambulations dans La Foire aux atrocités
LA DISSECTION DU MONDE CONTEMPORAIN CHEZ J.G. BALLARD
Anybody here read JG Ballard’s “The Atrocity Exhibition?”
Analysis and Interpretation of the Visualisation of Traumatic Experience in J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition
TAE @ Fantastic Fiction
Piecing Together J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition
J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Trauma Narrative
Acts of reconsideration: J.G. Ballard annotating and revising editions of The Atrocity Exhibition
La mort de l’affect dans The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
Reading The Atrocity Exhibition: A History of Forms
Jarry, Joyce and the Apocalyptic Intertextuality of The Atrocity Exhibition
The Art of The Atrocity Exhibition
”Sex(ual identity) Is Dead: J.G. Ballard’s Post-Humanist Myths of the Near Future,”
J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Postmodern Dystopia
The death of JG Ballard considered as an atrocity exhibition

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Extras

The Atrocity Exhibition (JG Ballard and the Motorcar) [1970]

JG Ballard on science fiction, technology and the future

Harnessing Perversity: J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, and Crash

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JG Ballard’s Excerpt notes

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Interview

Do you prefer using a specific locale in your work? In The Crystal World, for instance, you set the scene in Central Africa.

I use the locales that seem suitable to the subject at hand. I’m drawn to certain kinds of landscape: deserts, jungles, deltas, certain kinds of urban landscape. I suppose I like very formalised landscapes, like great dunes or sand bars. I’m drawn to freeways, concrete flyovers, the metallised landscapes of giant airports.

As far as naming a particular place goes — well, take something like Atrocity Exhibition. It’s not really set anywhere. It probably is England, in fact, but it could equally be elsewhere. A lot of Americans think it’s the United States. It’s not specifically the U.S. but it could be. It’s really a landscape we see in our minds, which we carry around with us, which we might see as we dream.

Why did you start writing the so-called condensed novels?

I wanted to write directly about the present day, and the peculiar psychological climate that existed in the middle sixties, when I started writing them. I think the key to that book was Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, which I saw — and still do see — as the most important event of the whole of the nineteen-sixties. It seemed to me that to write about this, and about similar events that were taking place, like the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, and the emergence of political figures like Ronald Reagan, and the whole tremendous explosion of the mass media, the way politicians and advertising corporations were using them — well, it was to try to come to terms with all this. It seemed to me it was creating a landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic novel; we were living more and more inside a strange, enormous work of fiction.

Reality and fiction were crossing each other.

Yes, they’d begun to reverse — the only point of reality was our own minds. It seemed to me that the only way to write about all this was to meet the landscape on its own terms. Useless to try to impose the conventions of the 19th-century realistic novel on this incredible five-dimensional fiction moving around us all the time at high speed. And I tried to develop — and I think successfully — a technique of mine, the so-called condensed novels, where I was able to cross all these events, at right angles if you like. Like cutting through the stem of a plant to expose the cross section of its main vessels. So this technique was devised to deal with this fragmentation and overlay of reality, through the fragmentation of narrative. Although the plot lines are very strong in those stories.

And they’re all variants. Each of the main stories in that collection describe the same man in the same state of mental crisis, but they treat him, as it were, at different points along a spectrum — as you might compile a scientific dossier about someone, explore various aspects of his make up. On the one hand a story like ‘The Summer Cannibals’, where a man and a woman have turned up at a kind of super-heated resort. This is a completely naturalistic account of two people on the level of their sweat glands. In fact they don’t have names, because their names are not important. Right through to the other extreme, where the character is seen as a kind of cosmic hero, a second coming of Christ, in ‘You And Me And The Continuum’. The same character appears in a whole series of different roles. Any of us could be fragmented in the same way, we are all to some extent.

Atrocity wasn’t liked very much by critics.

It had very bad reviews over here, on the whole. But in Europe, oddly enough, the response was completely different. Denmark, Germany, Holland — it had a terrific reception, absolutely stupendous, What impressed me about the reviews was not that they were flattering, but that they grasped straight away what the book was about. Most of the English reviewers seemed to resent not just the technique, the style in which the book was written, but also the subject matter, that I should want to talk about such things.

In America the entire Doubleday edition was destroyed, on the orders of an executive, for similar reasons. The book has just been published in America under a different title [Love and Napalm: Export USA], by Grove Press. As far as response to the stories on the US SF scene goes, you’ve got to bear in mind that there I was seen as the originator of the so called New Wave — terrible phrase — and I was absolutely loathed by most of the American SF establishment. The old guard — Isaac Asimov and company — would almost go red in the face with anger. But that particular storm, New Wave vs. Old Wave, has died down; it was just a sort of last spasm of the old guard, I think,

The Atrocity Exhibition was published in 1970 — could you say anything about what you’ve done since?

Well, my last novel I finished three weeks ago. I’d rather not give the story away as it won’t be published here for a year [presumably Concrete Island; SS]. But a previous novel, entitled Crash, will be published in June by Cape. I spent about two years writing that. As the title implies it’s about the motor car, and its whole role in our lives. It’s a cautionary tale in a sense, how I see the future. Sex times technology equals the future. In the novel I take the motor car as most clearly representing technology in our lives.

Taking off from ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’?

In a sense it’s a follow on, but it’s written in completely conventional narrative. I felt that was the best technique to use.

So you still feel it’s OK to me conventional structures?

I think one has to adjust the style to the subject matter. People have accused me of being an experimental writer, but I’ve written 90 short stories and 6 novels, of which 80 short stories and 6 novels are completely conventional, in technique and form. I think the subject matter comes first; the style and technique serve the subject matter; and I still think there’s a place for conventional narrative. It’s the idea that needs to be needled. My real criticism of most of the fiction written today is that the content is so banal, so second rate, so imitative of itself. It’s a fiction based on fiction, other people’s fiction, rather than based on experience and ordinary life.

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Book

J. G. Ballard The Atrocity Exhibition
Grove Press

‘First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of ‘Crash’ and ‘Super-Cannes’, who has supplied explanatory notes for this new edition. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, pscyhopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.’ — Flamingo

Excerpt

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p.s. Hey. If anyone out there would like to hear Diarmuid Hester talk about my work and me on the Bad Gays podcast, you can do that here. ** Dominick, D-ster!!!! Yay!!! Everyone, It’s a great day among days because the new, eighth issue of Dominik’s key lit/art zine SCAB is now available to peruse, absorb, scour, and more. The new issue has tons of amazing stuff in it including pieces by DC’s familiars Josiah Morgan and Golnoosh Nour. Set aside most of your brain cells and click this ASAP. I saw the announcement yesterday, as you know, and I’m going through and loving the issue to death. You rule, maestro. Great work! I think there’s a Zoom meeting about the fundraising in the next day or so, so I’ll know better then. That duo you chose would make very fine Cooper characters indeed! Hm … I think my first assignment for them is to, first, become the embodiment of love in two parts, then to silkscreen SCAB onto every article of their clothing and make signs advertising SCAB to carry around with them everywhere and print out piles of SCAB #8 and set off into the wide world with orders to employ their yumminess in service of that great cause, G. ** Misanthrope, The escort posts do seem too becoming more and more comedic. Whereas the slave posts seem to be becoming more and more horrifying. I wonder why. Going on ‘Rise of the Resistance’ is one of my biggest dreams right now. Sigh. Being parents to overgrown children is good for your soul maybe? ** David Ehrenstein, One hopes, yes. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! Yeah, a pretty good batch, I thought so too. So happy to hear the darkness is abating, man. And that you’re into the novel, which is, obviously, the best news. Sure, Skyping sounds great. I’m around, by default. Let me know when is good. I read that Tobias Carroll interview a while back. Nice convo. He’s cool. Everyone, Jeff Jackson is interviewed about the connection between his novel ‘Destroy All Monsters’ and band Julian Calendar by the fine-minded Tobias Carroll at Vol 1 Brooklyn here, and it’s a goodie. Yes, I did a Robert Kramer post. Let’s see … Here I don’t think I’ve seen ‘Guns’, no. I’m due a visit to the Re:Voir shop and I’ll look for it. Will do on the Milford Graves doc too. RIP to that great one. Great to see you, bud! ** Nathaniel Kochan, Hi, Nathaniel, welcome. Thanks about my stuff. At my first quick peek, those videos look amazing, I must say. Thank you! I’ll go check out the lot of them later. And go see your show at Le musée du Fumeur if at all possible (I’m a bit bottled up with a film shoot this week, but I think I can swing by). Funny, my friend and collaborator Zac Farley lives practically across the street from that place, and I’ve walked by it a billion times and never entered. Thanks! I’ll do that. Take care. ** Steve Erickson, Best of luck quelling the deal with your super, obviously. We don’t in fact have a strict lockdown here. Closed restaurants/cafes/museums and a 6 pm curfew is what we have. The govt. is trying to do everything possible not to lock Paris down again because the economic disaster and public outcry that would ensue, but it is looking more than a bit grim. I know the name Emmanuel Mouret, but I don’t think I’ve seen his films. Huh. Your description of that one film isn’t a huge magnet towards it, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled. ** Mark Gluth, Hi, Mark. I totally understand your thinking or deliberative lack off thinking about your process. As much as I graph things out for my work, I still feel pretty confused when I’m actually writing it. I guess it’s like wanting the safety of a conceptual path in which to lose myself or something. It’s funny, the US has seemed like such a total disaster over here about the pandemic, and yet at the moment everyone here is envying the speed of your recovery. The French authorities have really fucked up the vaccine roll out. It’s very surprising. I hope we’ll be in the hopeful phase over here, god, soon. ** Brian, Totally tip-top, tremendous Tuesday, Brian. ‘Playtime’ is a sublime masterpiece if there ever was such a thing. I know I’ve seen Yang’s ‘That Day, on the beach’. Maybe another one, I can’t remember. He seems like a good director to take a dive into. Thanks! My yesterday wasn’t one for the books either. Today my collaborators and I will be at the Pinault Foundation trying to firm up our ‘home haunt’ event with them, meaning trying together them to agree to pay for it. That’s today’s crux. I hope your Tuesday finds and rewards you. ** Thomas Moronic, Mr. T! I know that feeling when you find out someone whose work you admire likes your work. It’s really just the ultimate feeling ever, no? Well, if our govt. is to be believed, ha ha, you might just get to pop over here and gorge on espressos with moi by April or so. Hey, you never know. Love, me. ** Right. I decided to spotlight my favorite JG Ballard book today, and that’s what I’ve done. See you tomorrow.