Pacificapocalypse

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

J.G Ballard has died.

While not unexpected, it still saddens me greatly.
I discovered Ballard by reading about Burroughs in an old RE/Search pub ‘Industrial Culture Handbook’. Jeez that was in 1983… wow. Anyway I was heavy into science fiction so I started reading ‘High Rise‘ then ‘Terminal Beach‘ and finally ‘Crash‘. From the first couple of chapters into ‘High Rise’ I knew this wasn’t the Sci Fi I was used to. By the time I finished ‘Crash’ I was deeply aware that this, perhaps, wasn’t the standard recommended reading material for ‘young adults’ (If you saw the movie version of ‘Crash‘ I can tell you quite truthfully.. they prettied it up. The book is… explicit.)
Ballard was the master of ‘dystopian fiction’ which after a steady diet of shiny plastic futures in so many previous books, fit nicely into my world view of the mid/late 1980’s. Punk/Industrial/Goth all were hitting their stride; I was ending high school with a big fuck you to ‘normal society’. I had blue hair and a leather jacket. I was mad at the world. What the hell did I know?
Ballard was perfect.

I thought ‘Empire of the Sun‘ was magnificent even before I knew it was an autobiographical account of Ballard as a boy in Japanese occupied China; after wards I sought out the book and was again floored by Ballard’s words.

“Death always presents the face of surprised recognition,” William S. Burroughs.

V.Vale who chronicled both Ballard and Burroughs said “I expected Ballard to live at least as long as Burroughs, who reached the age of 83, even after having been “a junkie” for years of his life. By a strange logic, I felt that since Ballard hadn’t been a junkie, he should live even longer than 83.”

Unreasonable of course, but yeah, I know what he means.