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December 17, 2005
Post-Millennium-Rebellions
J. G. Ballard has been writing the same novel ad nauseam. The curious about Ballard's writings is that structural repetition doesn't matter. The detective story will have readers guessing the solution long before the narrator, whose assumptions are painfully inept. Even the temporal structure of the novel revisits familiar territory; and the clunkiness of much of the prose should come as no surprise to anyone who has read any of the author's recent novels. But nobody reads Ballard for structural innovation or stylish prose. They read him for the ideas and the ideas are the most interesting.
Millennium People tells the story of a middle-class revolt. Action takes place in Chelsea Marina, whose residents - middle-market professionals being slowly priced out of the London housing market - are sick of paying exorbitant maintenance charges and excessive parking fees; sick, moreover, of being relied upon to be tolerant and liberal, of being forced to enjoy the right kinds of activities, eat the right foods and wear the right clothes.
Ballard has identified the stress points of modern British society - from parking charges and property development to random acts of violence such as the Hungerford killings - and recombined them in startling ways. The novel deals with terrorism, but for Ballard terrorist aims are often merely justifications for unleashing the liberating power of violence. These acts of violence serve as protests against a future Ballard has long warned us about - one in which nothing happens - and a defence against an all-embracing mediocrity.
Ballard has charted the future with such accuracy that almost any contemporary feature of our landscape, psychic or physical, can be described as Ballardian. Weirdly enough, his work has never fed back successfully into more modern media than print but Ballard is still among the most powerful.
Dig for more in one Ballard's extended interviews for Spike here.
A hat is about a scalp. With high winds and freezing temps and mud rendering down to pottery by oxidation and heat, I am on the lookout for a solid, black, confortable hat. I'm on a fedora type, down to where size matters and going to unleash cash as soon as I get the right fit. I'm a frequent shaver learning from memory, a fun combination and a nice gift forward. And a fit under the tree precisely in its round cardboard box. Get a hat, plan in advance or try every one you see. And if you don't, have your boyfriend do so. Now, is that a gangster hat? Oh, so?
Typographica is a journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design.
KONG is restaurant designed by Philippe Starck. Worth a visit. Starck is also involved in the Virgin Galactic Spaceport
Remixed Vinyls is customised 12" vinyls by designers. By Wear It With Pride
Christian Lindemann is a fine Illustrator and Graphic Designer from Hannover with an interesting Portfolio.
Could we ignore mentioning D&G's extending reach all the way to mobile phones? Yes, we could. But when it comes to gold a polite warning is mandatory.
The Italian design duo Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have added a distinctive liquid gold finish, a personalised background with screensaver, a tailored sound for power up and down, an exclusive polyphonic ring tone and a video clip illustrating 20 years of Dolce & Gabbana brand history. The limited edition RAZR V3i also includes rich functionality with a 1.23 mega pixel digital camera, optional expandable memory in the classic RAZR form.
If you really need to swallow a bitter drop of ultimate evil you know what to buy. Golden colored curly hairs are, of course, mandatory.
The limited edition RAZR V3i marks the end to glitter. Don't say we did not give you good advance notice.
A History of Violence hits like a slap on the face: a near-perfect film that manages to be confounding, hilarious, shocking, infuriating, and enormously moving – usually all at the same time. Yes, it’s audacious. It’s manipulative and gory and chilly and at times seems so wildly uneven that you wonder if any two people on set had been given the same shooting script. But God bless him, David Cronenberg has accomplished his masterwork by squeezing all of his unique observations about the human condition into a non-Cronenbergian film. And with his trademark creepiness curbed, he has turned in one of the most jaw-droppingly humane gorefests ever made.
Viggo Mortenson plays Tom Stall, small-town man whose perfect, loving family upper-middle-class existence are nothing short of the American dream. Kids and wife (Maria Bello) genuinely love him, he works hard at his business (he owns a diner) and seems to be respected in the community. Tom gives off a quiet integrity that most men could practice for years and still never perfect: balanced, intelligent, and tempered. But when two “bad men” wheel into town (after murdering several people – including a young girl – in the opening scene) and attempt to rob Tom’s diner, everything changes in a matter of seconds. One moment these two thugs have taken Tom and his fellow citizens hostage, and the next both lie dead on the floor by Tom’s quick and alarming agility with a firearm and a pot of hot coffee. Tom becomes a hero, but the cycle of violence that has been set into motion by his act will spin in ever-widening circles, threatening to rip Tom, his family, and his community to shreds. Things begin to deteriorate days after the incident, following two tracks – one Tom’s, and one involving his son, Jack. While Tom is visited at his diner by a group of men who claim to know him as Joey Cusack from Philadelphia – supposedly some sort of cold-blooded contract killer – his sensitive son’s continued problems with an aggressive bully have been complicated by Jack’s father’s heroism. Although Tom’s quick response may have solved the problem in the diner, his aggression is creating more questions than answers for those around him. Is violence an acceptable answer, after all? If so, where is the line between self-defense and sadism? And how is it that one violent man can be a monster, when another is a savior? As the threat of compounded violence continues to rise (within the Stall household and without), these questions become percussive. Is it too far? Is violent action ever to be celebrated? If not, is the heroism that accompanies it hollow?
“A History of Violence” is able to present this discussion within the context of a generic system where such things are never questioned. Wrapped into the familiar form of a violent crime thriller, Cronenberg’s calm observations are doubly effective. “Violence” addresses the issues from within the system. He could have made a cold, calculated drama about violence that examined the subject from an academic vantage point – but he would have ignored the inescapable primal pull that violence has – the fascination that draws our eyes out the window at a traffic accident. In Cronenberg’s tale, violence is an inescapable fact but it’s a force that can and must be controlled.
Cronenberg's former obsession of “body terror” has been shifted in favor of the more potent topics of culpability, regret, and community responsibility. The question of how to stop a cycle of violence is a tough one and it is both refreshing and immensely rewarding to see Cronenberg take on the subject on all cylinders, dispensing with much of the fetishistic imagery and kooky theatrics of his more avante-garde work. Beyond this, Cronenberg’s touch is very plainly visible in everything from the static framing to the eerie calm and awkward silences. His sense of humor is as pitch-dark as ever, bringing unexpected levity to otherwise harrowing scenes and twisting expectations into pretzels.
Few films dare you to pretend that you’re not learning something while you’re enjoying the suspense, the gunplay and the blood. In the case of “History”, it’s a lesson worth learning.
Posted by lck at December 17, 2005 09:11 PM
