In Memoriam J.G. Ballard

This is a post that has been waiting unfinished for weeks. Although Ballard died two months ago now, I still want to pay my respects and maybe turn someone onto his amazing writing which was so much more than the Empire of the Sun...


J.G. Ballard was a writer who dealt in dystopias, dreams (mainly nightmares), disorders (mainly mental and sexual) and drugs. At the same time he was a family man who raised two daughters alone, spoke with a plummy accent and never let anything more adventurous than whisky and soda past his lips.

By the time he died on 19 April 2009, Ballard had published 19 novels, a dozen or so short story collections and countless other pieces. Even in the last months of his life he continued to write, producing a book on the cancer which was killing him called Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life.

I first came to Ballard in my early teens, attracted by the shocking titles (example: "The Asassination of President Kennedy considered as a downhill car-race", "Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan") and the eerie, moody atmosphere of the work: perfect for a teenager.

I remember particularly the wonderful, crepuscular atmospheres of the collection Vermilion Sands, short stories set in a world that has stopped turning, and in which what remains of humanity inhabits a narrow, twilit strip of desert, plundering abandoned supermarkets for strange, luxurious provender and lost in lonely reverie. What this stuff said to a confused fifteen-year-old I can no longer accurately say: but it affected me deeply and helped to mould an aesthetic that still haunts me.

The early novels are also electrifying in their strangeness, their unconditional embrace of the other. Take The Drowned World, with its poetic descriptions of a London utterly submerged, or The Crystal World, with its too-literal fantasy of everything turning to rubies, diamonds and emeralds.

But despite these novels, Ballard was largely ignored by a literary community obsessed by novels of society and manners, neither of which figured greatly in Ballard's work. Where they did, they were indicators of an inner sickness or mental aberration: the calm smooth surface of a society was for Ballard like a glass motorway barrier dulling and attenuating the whoosh and the roar of unleashed humanity, as shown in novels like High Rise, Crash or the later Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes.

Finally though I just wanted to register my appreciation and wonder for the body of work that Ballard produced. To explain and describe each book would take longer than this occasional blogger can handle, but I'd like to give a personal list of favourites, my recommended reading:

Novels:

The Drowned World
The drought
Hello America
Super Cannes: A Novel
Unlimited Dream Company
High Rise
Crash
The Atrocity Exhibition
Empire of the Sun

Short stories

Vermilion Sands
The Voices Of Time
Low flying Aircraft and Other Stories
Myths of the near future

The other Athens

I think that most people have already seen enough pictures of the Acropolis, Temple of Zeus and so on, but when do you get to see the other side of Athens, from the really scuzzy to the frankly strange? Is Greece the only country where they sell shoes (not medical footware, mind you) in pharmacies?

From Athens April 2009

From Athens April 2009

From Athens April 2009

From Athens April 2009

Are you sitting comfortably?

High above Athens stands the Church of Agios Isidorou. From here, sitting on benches that form a horseshoe of seating around the diminutive church, you can look down on the breathtaking spread of the city, born of the unfortunate union of reinforced concrete with laissez-faire urban planning.

As you sit, you can also enjoy amusingly phrased signs like this one, attached to the back of the pole that holds up the strings of fairy lights that illuminate the church at night. It says: "Peak hours may necessitate that you let other people sit on your lap."
Get set for peace, love and understanding.

Two suns fail to dazzle

Is it just me? All over the web people are blogging the praises of the second Bat for Lashes record, Two Suns. I rather like it too, but I feel that reviewers are going a bit overboard with their praise (e.g. Pitchfork).
It's a very pleasant record with some strong songs, and Natasha Khan has a great voice. Everything here is going in the right direction. But overall I find it rather too slight, rather too conventional for all the praise it's getting. It's good, yes. But not great.

A comparison with one of my favourite recent albums, Under Byen's 2007 LP Samme Stof Som Stof, is perhaps instructive. Here we see a band that have truly mastered their medium (through 15 years of hard work), and for whom conventions are not restrictions but toys to be played with or ignored as required. Natasha Khan is on the right track and definitely a talent to watch for the future. And that's the good news: this album might be good, but the next one can only be better.

Bat for Lashes will play at the Kulturkirche in Cologne on 18 May
View event info on last.fm

The real Ras Tafari

The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński

Rating: 3 of 5 stars
I suppose that I have been spoilt by Ryszard Kapuściński in the past, but while The Emperor is certainly a fine piece of writing it doesn't reach his usually high standards.

Perhaps it's in the very nature of the exercise, for The Emperor is a book of reminiscences, retelling the last days of Haile Selaisse's rule in Ethiopia, from the perspective of mainly minor officials and servants.

The result is a book of peculiarly matt surfaces and vague description. For me the palace, with its lackeys, its fawning "notables" and horrid, grabbing dignitaries never really comes alive, mediated as it is by the memories of feeble, defeated men.

So while I can't recommend the book unconditionally in terms of style or as a good example of Kapuściński's art (he simply isn't present enough here), I can certainly recommend it as a study in the morally degenerative effects of power. So if you're looking for a good primer on how to become morally degenerate once you have attained absolute power, this might be a good place to start.

View all my reviews on goodreads.

No guns, no dogs - them's the rules

Bulgaria may be part of the EU, but there are still things about the country that distinguish it from most others in Europe. One of them is the "No Guns" stickers that are found on the doors of bars, clubs and even shopping centres.
And indeed Sofia, the country's capital, does have a higher level of gun crime than many other comparable cities. But do you think that the Sofia gangstas will see the signs and leave their shooters (and hopefully their pit bulls) in their SUVs? Somehow I doubt it...

What we did on our holidays: Part 1 - Serbia

It might seem a little eccentric to take the train from Cologne to Sofia in Bulgaria, but then again, maybe I am a little eccentric. En route plenty of interesting things happened, including random bag searches by obstreperous border guards and thievery in the small hours (I'll tell you about it later). There was also plenty to see. I was particularly impressed with the mysterious and beautiful Serbian countryside and the affecting state of disrepair of the railway stations. The pictures below come from my Sony-Ericsson mobile phone, by the way.

A day at the races

Having grown up in England, racing is a pastime that I associate with the Derby, the Grand National and ladies in funny hats. Basically an experience for the elite and the addicted.

Going to the races in Germany is, in comparison, a pleasantly democratic experience, involving everything that you would expect from a Volksfest, including sausages, beer, fried fish and red-faced gentlemen mopping brows warmed by indulgence in the aforementioned foodstuffs.



As well as offering relaxing atmosphere, our local racecourse in Cologne also provides a gently-paced racing schedule which allows racegoers to flow from track to paddock and back to the track like a gentle human tide.

But I think I'm beginning to overreach myself on the metaphors. Whatever - I'll be there again a few more times before the season is out.

A dog's Dina

I am Dina (Norway, 2002)

Faced with the prospect of a Norwegian film in English with a plethora of international actors, I should have seen the warning signs. For one, people speaking accented English to convey the sense of a foreign language has always annoyed me ("Zose are ze fekts, mein fuhrer!").

This film isn't perhaps quite that awful, but the plot appears to have been written by the committee for Silly Twists together with the Fjord Tourist Board.

Equally, the style of the film is all over the place: a smörgåsbord of genre-dipping ranging from horror and ghost-tale to melodrama, costume drama, sub-Ibsenesque family saga, Bergman-lite and god knows what else.

Together these result in an utterly confusing accretion of episodes that usually end in death, or haunting, or both, but no clear directorial stance on how see either.

What I'm missing is any kind of moral, aesthetic or conceptual centre. We must remember that the woman upon whom the film centres is responsible for several deaths, at least one of the premeditated. But is she mad? Is she hallucinating? Is she simply dreaming?

Which brings us to the central character. Dina is played by the lovely Maria Bonnevie, who gives everything to make the role (strong, headstrong, creative and unconventional woman in a small, backward community) work. Personally I'm all in favour of strong female roles but the one that this film serves up is a completely anachronistic, projecting modern modes of behaviour onto a time where a woman would not have been able to do what Dina does without getting shut up in a nunnery or a madhouse at the very least.

Shouldn't a film that shows a woman overcome adversity and male prejudice at least show some pretty effective adversity and male prejudice? For most of this film Dina rides roughshod over men and women alike (or unshod, depending upon the stable boy in question). It's as if her initial trauma is so overwhelming that the world simply makes way for her for the rest of her life. Fat chance.

Therefore I'd have to recommend any discerning viewer to give this portentous, confused example of the international co-production a miss.

DID THE CAPS LOCK KEY GET STUCK WHILE WRITINg SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE?

I went into Slumdog Millionaire with high expectations based on friends' ratings, but came out feeling slightly knocked about and empty, as if I too had suffered at the hands of the Mumbai constabulary.

I'd like to emphasise though that my problem with the film was not its fable-like narrative - the sketchy, inconsistent and unexplained nature of events and the refusal to explain was rather a strength for me. Rather, it was the overall style and the compulsion to take the symmetries of plot and circumstance (which are a standard part of almost any narrative) and supercharge these to the extent that they become big signs screaming LOOK AT ME! I'M AN ECHO OF A PREVIOUS/PARALLEL SCENE!!!

Due to this overworked mechanism, the film lost me at its "climax", the point at which one brother wins 20 million rupees and the other brother is simultaneously gunned to death in a bathtub full of banknotes. Up to that point I had been quite happy to coast along on the Lonely Planet aesthetic of penury and picaresque, but after that it was a lost cause. It didn't even matter that the music was by a Singalese girl from West London (M.I.A.), or that Danny Boyle's aggressive jump-cut style turned every conflagration into a wheeze and a romp. But the bathful of money was the point where I pulled out the plug and started to wonder: does this film say anything useful about India? Or even about "Who wants to be a Millionaire"? Has it got anything to say at all other than slums are bad, crooks are bad, and "true love conquers all?"

A good film should reflect its age and say something about its main subject at least. But this one simply throws its boundless energy at a topic that begs for some sinuousness, intelligence and subtlety. For god's sake, it doesn't have to be La Dolce Vita, but a palette that includes something other than VERY BRIGHT and VERY DARK would have been welcome.

Overall not a bad film, but not a particularly good one either.

See my film comments on IMDB

Hook Norton Brewery

For me, one of the great pleasures of being in England is the beer. Lower in alcohol than the continental stuff (3-4 percent), with bags of flavour and all the more drinkable for not being too cold or too fizzy.

One of the best proponents of classic ales in Oxfordshire is the Hook Norton Brewery in North Oxfordshire, a historical firm that dominates the charming Cotswold village of the same name.

We went to the Brewery recently, taking a look at the museum before repairing to the Tasting Room, where we tried several beers from the Hook Norton range: Hooky Best, a clear, plangent bitter; the weightier, hoppier Old Hooky; and the superb Gold, a pale ale of supernal delicacy with a floral nose and a beautifully balanced finish.

After making several necessary purchases we moved on to the nearby pub for a bite of lunch - and a decent pint of beer. I chose mother-in-law pie for lunch - a steak pie that is so named because the meat is marinaded in Old and Bitter before being cooked.

Thanks to my dad for staying sober and driving us home...


The brewery


A pub sign, perhaps?

Penny lane is in my ears

...and in my eyes. But it's not on Merseyside. Of course the 'real' Penny Lane is in Liverpool, but there's another one in the wonderfully named Crazies Hill in Berkshire, just a few steps from my parents' front door. As a child I used to take the family dog walking here. Now I can take my son. Unfortunately he doesn't really like wearing a lead and collar, though.

Where once there were fields of wheat, rye and cattle on either side of this enchanting, high-walled ancient footpath, one side now borders a golf course, which means that you have to keep an eye out for hard white flying objects and people wearing silly clothes shouting "four"!

But the golf course does have one advantage. Four year olds find the idea of looking for golf balls very entertaining and can be persuaded to take very long walks when there's a promise of finding plenty of them. Our haul on the day in question was ... four!

Photos below show the beginning (with my son Ivan), middle and end of Penny Lane, starting on Worley's Lane and ending on Crazies Hill road.

Bad husband

One morning we drove over to Hook Norton in North Oxfordshire, where they have an excellent brewery. On the way back we stopped at the Rollright Stones, a wonderfully gnarled and atmospheric mini-Stonehenge. [See previous blog post]

On the path leading to the stones the following devastating but amusing sign was on display:



Someone was in big trouble that night...

The Rollright Stones

Standing stones are a feature of the English countryside, like narrow, hedged-in lanes and endless golf clubs. The Rollright Stones in North Oxfordshire are a particularly atmospheric example, due to the strange, weathered appearance of the stones and the legend which says that they are in fact a group of warriors who were turned to stone by a witch.

Puffball

While we were in England we spent a lot of time walking, and one of the oddest things we saw on our walks was this puffball.



About the size of a standard football, it was the largest I have ever seen, and was a source of amazement to my son. When I told him that it is a kind of fungus/mushroom, and that it is also edible he said "Is that a joke, daddy?"
As you can see from the pictures we did give it a little tap to get it properly puffing.

More on Wikipedia...

A new bike

I went to our local bike shop this evening and tried out several two-wheelers. Having been out of the picture in terms of bikes for at least 15 years, I needed some advice, and the salesman in the shop was very helpful. Three test rides later, I finally settled on the VSF T50, which offered the optimum mix of city bike and firmer feel that I appear to like (not something that I necessarily expected). Not wanting to spend my money without doing the due dilligence, I also checked out other offers, but I finally decided to go for the one that I liked in the first place. A question of gut feeling I suppose.

What struck me today is how much bike technology has moved on: the dynamo for the headlight is now built into the wheel, the back light is an automatic context-sensitive dynamo-driven affair, and in order to shift gears, you simply twist the inner part of the right handle and the gears slip smoothly from one to the next. Even the chain has disappeared behind a slick, flexible cover, so no more bicycle clips and ruined trousers.
Here's to being a biker! Leather jacket and Lemmy beard to come...

This is England

A great film. Vibrant and beautifully made, This is England is a stark reminder of the ragged England of the early 80's, a time which seemed to combine all the worst aspects of capitalism - laissez-faire, militaristic, socially fractured and often just plain ugly.
This film throws us in at the deep end of this untempting era, tracing the life of Shaun, a young boy in a northern English town who has to come to terms with his father's death in the Falklands war, his own problems at school, and his mother's benignly neglectful attitude (under a scary 80's perm, she prefers to watch Blockbusters rather than deal with her son's emotional problems).
In this grim context, Shaun happens upon and is adopted by a group of skinheads who offer him friendship and self-esteem. While the skins are a slightly rough lot, they are not at this point racists. In fact one of their number, Milky, is black. But as the film progresses, we see how far-right "England first" elements come to dominate the scene. And here we reach what is the film's main theme: the insidious slide into racism that marked the skinhead subculture's path through the eighties.
As such it's an interesting story, but too much of a cultural footnote to support a whole feature film. But director Shane Meadows manages to take this subject matter and imbue it with a significance beyond its historical context. What is the nature of individual and national identity? How do we constitute our self images, and to what extent is the individual consciousness a product of social, economic and political forces, rather than the precious flame of liberty that some liberals would like to believe in? All these questions are raised, displayed and rotated before us in a compelling and ambivalent way. Anyone who moans about today's obsession with labels and brands should take a look at this film as a reminder that this kind of thing was already happening back then.
The film's look is rough and ready, an unsentimental representation in a rawly realistic mode. The one thing the had me a little confused was the geography. The characters all talk in Northern accents, but where we are is somehow indeterminate as West Yorkshire, Scouse and east coast accents mingle. Not a big criticism, but the only one I could find in this otherwise remarkable film.

Emiliana Torrini in Cologne

Emiliana Torrini can speak German, and she does it with a delightful Icelandic accent. Unless you speak German too, you'll not understand the hilarity of a shaggy dog story that she told about a "Gemüseschwanz". Whatever, it caused plenty of amusement for the 20 to 30-something crowd who had assembled to see her play in the "Kulturkirche", a deconsecrated church that puts on concerts, book readings and other cultural events.
As a space, the church enjoys a certain originality and atmosphere, especially for goth bands, I suppose, but this can't make up for two massive failings that are sure to make any passionate gig-goer pause.

The first problem is the sound. At last night's concert it was disastrous: a steely sheet of treble that bounces off the stonework and hits the listeners from every direction. At the other end of the scale, we had to send out a search party for the bass. In fact, the sound engineer may have thought it was some kind of fish for all I know, because he certainly didn't think that it was required to give weight, form and substance to the music. Which was a real pity, because la Torrini is a spirited and delightful performer, and her band also played on bravely against the treble storm. The quieter songs come over well, and the gig was worth it for these alone, as Torini certainly develops a poignancy and power in these ballads which could tumble into inconsequentiality in other hands. Standing watching her in my outdoor coat, I almost shed a tear.

And that's the venue's second problem: no cloakroom. This might be alright in a squat (where you wouldn't want to put your coat down, or trust the "staff"), but in a venue charging over 20 Euros for admission it's inexcusable.

Thumbs up, therefore for Torrini and band, thumbs down for the Kulturkirche.