Ben Wheatley's High Rise

My buddy Scott told me today that my favourite director is making a film of a book by my favourite author. This has got me pretty excited. My favourite director at the moment is Ben Wheatley who is one of the best British directors of his generation. He's made 4 films, 2 of which are utterly brilliant and the other 2 aren't bad. The brilliant ones are Kill List and Sightseers. 
...
My favourite author, of course, is JG Ballard who also just happens to be the greatest English novelist since WW2. A surrealist satiric poet often pigeon holed as a science fiction author, Ballard's reputation has only grown since his death five years ago. When you read Graham Greene or Kingsley Amis or Ballard's other contemporaries these days their novels feel like period pieces whereas Ballard somehow is as fresh and exciting as ever. That's a clue that he's the real deal. 
...
The great Ballard period was 1972 - 1979 when he produced award winning collections of short stories and a run of novels, all of which became classics: Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise and The Unlimited Dream Company. Ben Wheatley is making a film out of High Rise and if he's allowed a good budget it could be one of the great British films of this decade. A great film like Sightseers or Fish Tank I mean not tourist board rubbish like the Kings Speech. High Rise is the story of a group of people who live in a high rise apartment building that gradually descends into civil war between floors while the inhabitants at least initially continue to commute to their day jobs in the city of London. Its a classic Ballard conceit carried out with all the iron logic you'd expect from a master surrealist with a sense of humour, qualities Wheatley has in abundance too. Please don't let me down Ben.    

Edgelands

An interesting Edgeland that I saw last month in the Huon Valley, Tasmania:
half junkyard, half sheep pasture

A few months ago when I blogged about Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways I said that it was almost as if the book was designed specifically to please me (in contrast to much of our current culture which seems to be designed specifically to annoy the hell out of me)...In The Old Ways Macfarlane followed some of the ancient walking routes of Europe and conjured up the literary ghosts of previous travellers on those routes, particularly the poet Edward Thomas. The Old Ways became an unlikely international best seller on the strength of its writing and by appealing to the inner yearning of urban based reviewers and readers for the beauty of the great outdoors. Edgelands is a travel book written by two poets, Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley, which is a kind of anti-Robert Macfarlane. Instead of looking for the wilderness at the top of Scotland or in some deep wadi in Palestine Roberts and Farley find the strange, wild and wonderful just down the road from us in that bit of wasteland behind the bus station or in old quarries or junkyards or abandoned factories or canals. In Edgelands the spirit is less Robert Macfarlane and John Muir and more JG Ballard and William Burroughs. The book sets out to be an exploration of "England's True Wilderness" and it reminded me of Ballard's Unlimited Dream Company and Concrete Island and Ian Sinclair's walk around the M25 recorded in London Orbital. Because the authors are poets who love poetry there is a full length poem or a lengthy extract in nearly every chapter from many great contemporary poets. Even more so than Macfarlane the authors realise that it is poets and artists who can see through the mundane to the sublime beyond. (I forgot who it was that said that if you stare at anything long enough it becomes beautiful.)
...
Roberts and Farley celebrate the weirdness of all night golf driving range, container parks, scrubby woods, motorway service stations, airport car parks and they see loveliness - as, famously, Derek Mahon does - in burned out hotels, old alleys and dereliction. This, as I say, is a kind of anti Robert Macfarlane aesthetic but it's just as good as him (better actually in some ways because the authors have a sense of humour) and it even comes with a generous blurb from Macfarlane on the back cover. I don't know if it's been published in the US or Australia but you can get it on Amazon.co.uk and you can read a bit of it there too. 

The Swimmer As Hero

(a post from the blog's infancy)
...
I had never heard of Charles Sprawson's Haunts of the Black Masseur - The Swimmer as Hero until I read a review of the book by JG Ballard in an essay collection. Ballard endorsed it so strongly that I ordered it immediately from Amazon.com. It is a cultural and literary history of swimming through the ages, enlived by Mr Sprawson's own swimming exploits: learning to swim as a boy in India, bathing at Pliny's house in Como, dodging Russian tankers as he attempts the Hellespont, lounging in the pools of Hollywood. Sprawson is one of those people who have read everything and he must have dozens of notebooks full of swimming references which he generously doles out for our amusement in lovely, streamlined prose. Byron gets his own chapter as do the Romans, Greeks and German romantics and many likely and unlikely figures in between. The book is charmingly illustrated and bound. It would be flawless but for the fact that it lacks an index. Though published by the small University of Minnesota Press it has been continually in print since 1993; so I would urge U Minn to hire an indexer for the next printing and if they don't Mr Sprawson should jump to Penguin or NYRB who would, I'm sure, love to have him on their lists. Charles Sprawson's interview with the BBC is miraculously still available here.

The Songs of Molly Drake

In the 1970's the most important member of the Drake family to me was Gabrielle Drake who was one of the stars of the cult Gerry Anderson TV series UFO. Although they only ever made 26 episodes of UFO it seemed to be on all the time and it became as totemic to me as Star Trek, Dr. Who and the nihilistic Blake's Seven. By the 1980's my UFO phase was over and I was beginning to listen to the albums of Gabrielle Drake's brother, Nick. Everybody knows who Nick Drake is these days but in the 80's, if he was remembered at all, he was recalled as the painfully shy posh English folkie who failed to sell many records in his lifetime and (suffering from rejection and depression) ended up overdosing on amitriptyline (possibly accidentally). In the 1980's Nick Drake was still seen as a failure, not as a misunderstood lyrical and musical prodigy out of step with this time. By the 90's of course everything had changed and helped by a series of TV ads for various products a new generation had discovered Drake's music and especially his album Pink Moon. 
...
Nowadays Drake is an established presence in the musical firmament - a proto Jeff Buckley who, like Kurt and Gram and Shannon and Jeff and Marc, left us far too soon: biographies have been written, film projects discussed, his influence name checked from the likes of Regina Spektor to Edward Sharpe, to, er, Taylor Swift. The archives have been trawled for lost songs or lyrics, but unfortunately no lost songs or lyrics have been discovered; however earlier this year, remarkably, an album was released of songs written by his mother Molly Drake in the 1950's. 

You can listen to the album, here. 

The production values aren't so great as the songs were recorded in the Drake living room on a primitive tape recorder as Molly plays a slightly out of tune stand up piano, but Nick Drake's original engineer Joe Boyd should be given credit for saving these songs from oblivion and remastering what was there. Boyd has said this of Molly's music: "She was the missing link in the Nick Drake story – there, in the piano chords, are the roots of Nick's harmonies" Quite, and also perhaps the roots of Nick's melancholy too. Molly's songs are remarkably atemporal in their longings and sadness. There are strange reflections on birds and forests and on the transitory nature of love and life. The songs are fragile and oddly intense but at the same time very English and emotionally a little chilly. Molly's voice is that of a 1950's housewife (and you really can't help but listen to her lyrics through the prism of Betty Friedan) but there is an exotic quality here too. Nick Drake's parents met in Burma where they both worked for the British Imperial administration in the period George Orwell writes about in his excellent novel Burmese Days and the beautiful essay Shooting An Elephant (if you've never read Shooting An Elephant, rectify that immediately!)
...
As I say you can listen to the songs of Molly Drake at bandcamp.com, here and if you buy the album the CD comes with an intimate selection of Molly's poetry and reproductions of family photographs. There are 19 songs and fragments of songs and if you're pressed for time allow me to suggest that you try the haunting How The Wild Wind Blows and the very sad Poor Mum.
...
If you've never even heard of Nick Drake a good place to start is with my favourite song: One Of These Things First. 
...
(And I know this is off topic but since I have your attention I'd like to point you in the direction of Crash - the quirky film JG Ballard and Gabrielle Drake made in 1971 about Ballard's obsession with car crashes.)

Synth Britannia

As I said in the post below I've just finished a novel set in 1981 called The Cold Cold Ground and throughout the book the protagonist of the story, a Detective Sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, has a few little laments about the state of contemporary music. For him and for me the golden age of pop music was the period from about 1964 - 1980 when rock and roll was diverse and interesting and the great bands were firing on all cylinders. The death of John Bonham and the break up of Led Zeppelin brought to an end the amazing period of heavy metal, John Lennon's murder closed the book on the Beatles and the implosion of the Sex Pistols took much of the momentum from punk rock. 1981 saw the rise of synth pop and this was a music that I hated. Perhaps taking my cue from Britain's vicious music press, the NME, Melody Maker etc. in my 13 year old brain these bands were 'inauthentic' upper class art school boys playing poncy songs on poncy machines. Real men played guitars, basses and drums not synths. In fact as this BBC 4 documentary attempts to show the synth bands were the real outsiders: geeky working class kids heavily into JG Ballard, computers and dystopian sci-fi movies. In other words they were quite a bit like me. "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent," as Madame de Stael said. Indeed.

Home By JG Ballard

Dont know how I missed this when it came out. Its a film by the BBC based on a JG Ballard short story. If you don't know Ballard this is a nice introduction to his universe. All 7 parts are on youtube; Anthony Sher is fantastic:

Mais, Il Est Le Plus Populaire de L'autre Côté de La Sheugh

JG Ballard has always been more respected in France than in England (or America) where - until very recently - he was still considered to be a minor science fiction writer. Fortunately that is now changing and when the news slipped out last autumn that Ballard had terminal cancer a serious reappraisal began of Ballard's life and work. I finished Ballard's final book The Miracles of Life in the wee hours of this morning. It's an episodic autobiography which fills in the details he left out of his biographical novels Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. Miracles of Life of course talks about his time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Shanghai, but also about his early struggles with his sanity, the death of his young wife, his nasty feud with Kingsley Amis, the invective heaped upon him after the publication of Crash and his rather skeptical attitude towards his 'home' country. It's a great book, written with a very clear eye in dispassionate prose. I'm a Ballard completist, having read every one of his novels, essay and short story collections. The fact that this is the very last one is bitter sweet.

...

I was listening to Radio 4 a few weeks ago and the director of the opera Dr. Atomic was on talking about how Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman etc. were all "war criminals" for working on the Manhattan project and how Japan would have surrendered anyway without the A Bomb being dropped. I suppose this is now what is taught in the core curriculum of UK schools. Ballard of course has no time for this thesis and points out in Miracles of Life that but for the A bombs he and all the prisoners in the Shanghai camp would have been massacred along with millions of Chinese civilians in and around Shanghai since the Japanese Imperial Army in China had plans to fight to the last man and kill as many people as possible. It was only the dropping of the atomic bombs that forced Hirohito to surrender the Imperial forces en masse (and even on the day of the broadcast there was an attempted coup) saving hundreds of thousands of allied troops and millions of Japanese and Chinese lives. The dropping of the bombs was a terrible thing, but, Ballard argues, it prevented an even more terrible thing.

...

If you haven't read any Ballard, Empire of the Sun is a good place to start but my favourite era is the period 1973 - 1979 when he produced four extraordinary novels: Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise and The Unlimited Dream Company which I'd be happy to talk about in the comments below.