Christmas message

It's not been the most inspiring year all round, so here's hoping for better in the next.

Sub Parr

The above photo by myself has been selected by the rather well known photographer Martin Parr to feature in a new book he's publishing in partnership with the slightly controversial artist Joachim Schmid.

Schmid is controversial because his art mainly consists of appropriating work by other photographers, taken from online resources such as Flickr, without credit or regard to copyright. The book's a sort of photographic covers album, including original photos by Schmid in the style of Parr, and Parr-style photos selected by Parr himself from a tribute group on Flickr. Parr, ever the professional, contacted the photographers to seek permission, and gives them credit and copyright notice in the book. Thumbs up for him.

It's unlikely anyone will be making any money out of the book, but there it is. And just in time for xmas.

Doctor King's houses of horror

I've just been reading, somewhat belatedly, Jonathan Coe's very enjoyable state-of-the-(1980s)-nation gothic satire 'What a Carve Up!'. In his author's note at the end of the book, Coe notes his 'shadowy debt' to the works of Frank King, author of 'The Ghoul' (1928), on which the 1960 movie (from which Coe took his title and elements of plot) was loosely based. Coe also says that he had been unable to trace any information on King, whose bibliography also includes such thrilling titles as 'Terror at Staups House', 'This Doll is Dangerous', 'Death of a Cloven Hoof' and 'Only Half the Doctor Died'.

This immediately tickled a memory. Last year, the Halifax Courier published this story, based on research by local historian David Glover, on the life of what it calls one of the town's famous yet perhaps forgotten sons. Frank King was indeed born in Halifax in 1892 - just a few streets away from my house, in fact - worked as a doctor in the town before quitting to write full-time (something rather appropriate to Coe's book), and died in 1958 just out at Norton Tower.

Intriguingly, King was likely to have been writing at his offices in Rhodes Street at the time the Halifax Slasher panic struck the immediate neighbourhood.

If anyone is in touch with Coe, please do let him know.

The Complete Ballard

Arriving on my desk with an entirely appropriate crash, comes the new US edition of The Complete Stories of JG Ballard, courtesy of the publishers WW Norton.

An expanded version of the Complete Short Stories, published in the UK by Flamingo in 2001 and now a collector's item, the new volume weighs in at something over 1200 pages and 98 stories. It dwarfs the comparable tome for, say, John Cheever (whose best-known story, 'The Swimmer', is not exactly un-Ballardian).

It's also a monumental work in the literal sense - the book, and its marketing, seems designed to establish Ballard's reputation in the US, where he's more often regarded as a proto-cyberpunk oddity rather than the major literary visionary he latterly became in Europe (the UK lagging somewhat behind France, of course).

Within that unfortunately 80s-styled dustjacket sits everything from all the previous short story collections (apart the bulk of The Atrocity Exhibition, the nature of which as novel or short story collection remains moot for Ballardian scholars), plus a few rarities such as 'The Recognition' (from Dangerous Visions, 1967) and the handful of pieces published since 1990's War Fever collection.

The small number of more recent stories neatly illustrates the decline of the market for short stories, something that Ballard bemoans in his brief introduction republished from the UK edition. The majority of these stories date from the 1960s, appearing in titles from Amazing Stories to Playboy, as the Seer of Shepperton raised his family on the fruits of his restless typewriter.

Many readers (but not myself) rate Ballard's short stories above his novels. It's true that many of the novels resemble extended (arguably, over-extended) short stories rather than the conventional plots of the 'Hampstead novel' (Ballard's own contemptuous phrase for the works of most of his literary contemporaries). Later novels did take their narrative structure from the crime genre, but to create satirical and psychological why-dunnits rather than boring who-dunnits, and overlaid with the near-hallucinatory repetitions and riffs that characterised his more avant-garde masterpieces such as Crash. It's the literary equivalent of the best Krautrock.

By contrast, the short stories are purest pop, offering the most concentrated yet accessible doses of Ballard. The vision and the language are unmistakeable, from the first line of 'Prima Belladonna', written over half a century ago:
I first met Jane Ciracyclides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years...

The US Complete Stories is actually more complete than the UK Complete Short Stories, but is still not really complete. Unlike the original edition, it does include the minor (and slightly re-titled) 'The Secret Autobiography of J.G. B******' (first published in the French-language Etoile Mecanique in 1982) and Ballard's last published short story, 'The Dying Fall' (Interzone, 1996), as well as 'The Ultimate City' (Low-Flying Aircraft, 1976) which was included in the original single-volume UK edition but not the later two-volume version.

But there's still no 'Journey Across a Crater' (New Worlds, 1970, which Ballard was apparently never happy with), 'Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon' (Interzone, 1991), or various 'surgical fictions' and experimental pieces from Ambit, New Worlds and elsewhere. Nor (understandably) is there Ballard's first actual published story, the Hemingwayesque 'The Violent Noon', with which he won a university short story competition at the tender age of 20. Completists should refer to Rick McGrath's exhaustive (and slightly illicit) Uncollected J.G. Ballard.

But this is still a pretty much essential volume for anyone less obsessive than Rick or myself. It should certainly play a major role in consolidating Ballard's rep in the US - I hope mostly among people who will read it for the pure pleasure of his writing, as well as those in the man's detested 'over-professionalized academia'.

The main question for me is what gets priority on my shelf - this comprehensive volume, or my set of original anthologies, excavated from secondhand shops across the country over the years, all somewhat battered but redolent of their own times.

Memories of the Space Age

These are a few of a small set of slides that my parents bought in 1971 (when the Apollo 10 command module visited Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, Sheffield, as part of a travelling exhibition) showing key images from the Apollo 11 mission, the first landing on the moon, 40 years ago this week.
This is before my time, really - I was born just over a month before Apollo 17, the final manned mission to the moon, left the surface.



The slides, now somewhat aged, were digitally captured using a Canon EOS40D and 100mm macro lens, simply lit by a 430EX flash positioned directly behind the slide, and manipulated in Canon DPP.
The camera alone has more processing power than all the hardware used in the Apollo missions.



"What happened to the Space Age? Its once heroic vision of our planetary future now seems little more than a mirage, fading across the sandbars and concrete of Cape Kennedy like the ghost of a forgotten advertising campaign of last year's science-fiction blockbuster." - JG Ballard (1930-2009).

Rushkoff on economic disconnection

From Reality Sandwich, an entertaining interview with author Douglas Rushkoff about his new book Life Inc, a historical critique/polemic on the developing role of corporations in Western culture, touching on many topics of interest:

An over-arching theme I found in the book is how the common-sense stuff of our reality, the economy and money and shopping and working, is really science fiction; we don't live inside a "natural" economic structure -- we made it up.

It gets very much like Baudrillard in a way. We lived in a real world where we created value, and understood the value that we created as individuals and groups for one another. Then we systematically disconnected from the real world: from ourselves, from one another, and from the value we create, and reconnected to an artificial landscape of derivative value of working for corporations and false gods and all that. It is in some sense Baudrillard's three steps of life in the simulacra.

So by now, as Borges would say, we've mistaken the map for the territory. We've mistaken our jobs for work. We've mistaken our bank accounts for savings. We've mistaken our 401k investments for our future. We've mistaken our property for assets, and our assets for the world. We have these places where we live, then they become property that we own, then they become mortgages that we owe, then they become mortgage-backed loans that our pensions finance, then they become packages of debt, and so on and so on. We've been living in a world where the further up the chain of abstraction you operate, the wealthier you are.

Proper wuthering

Lovely piece from Martin Wainwright in the the walks supplement with today's Guardian, in which he rhapsodises about the wuthering beauty of Ogden Water and Ovenden Moor, wind farm and all, just north of Halifax (described, rather curiously, as a 'market town' - while there is a great indoor market, I'd say it's still a classic mill town).

There's also directions for the walk, which I've been round a few times myself.

Small wonder

Faced with spending most of yesterday on the train to London and back, I finally entered the 21st century and bought myself an iPod. I know - despite writing a lot about technology, I'm not exactly an early adopter.

I went out shopping for a basic model, and settled on what turned out to be the new Shuffle model. And it is bloody tiny. About the size and shape of a moderately showy tie-clip, it'd be worryingly easy to just lose it, or even blow it away with a good sneeze. If you really wanted, you could hide it in various places around your person without too much awkwardness, or even have it fitted subcutaneously. Blimey, it's small.

It holds 1000-odd songs (albeit as just-about-adequate MP3s) and has a claimed battery life of 10 hours. The memory isn't all that impressive - it's just a flash chip, and I've got equally diddy camera memory cards and USB drives that hold more than this gizmo's 3.8GB. It's the battery I'm more impressed by - I've not used it to its limits yet, but it had no problem with seven-odd hours on the trains yesterday. It's apparently a 3.7V lithium-polymer battery, in which the electrolyte is held in a solid polymer.

Here's how it all fits together, courtesy of the techno-vivisectionists at iFixit.

There's some damn smart engineering gone into this. And it cost less than the day's train tickets.

JG Ballard 1930-2009

JG Ballard, probably the greatest British novelist of the 20th century, died yesterday after a long battle with prostate cancer. He's been a huge influence on and inspiration for my own non-commercial work (writing and photography), and in recent years I've been an irregular contributor to the Ballardian website. The site editor, Simon Sellars, asked me to write something as part of the tribute to the man and his work. I sent the following.

I first read JG Ballard when I was 12 or so, after picking up 'Crash' (with that lurid orange Chris Foss cover) at a village hall jumble sale. I occasionally wonder to what degree this might have affected my development.

Over the next decade or so, I picked up a few other titles, but none hit me with quite the same force. I just wasn't struck by that intensity, that outrageous lucidity, which radiated from that battered paperback. But I gradually started to appreciate the subtler qualities of the writing, the humour, and the semi-detached perception. Gradually, his books started to just make sense to me. By the time I was living in a tiny flat in the dullest part of south London, barely writing a first novel and trying to find that elusive first job in journalism, I was a devotee.

So sometime round autumn 1996, I was thinking Ballardian thoughts as I trundled through the South Croydon wastelands towards an interview at some obscure trade journal. At the interview, the editor noted that, according to my desperately padded CV, I was working on a novel. 'Oh yeah,' he said. 'JG Ballard used to work here.' I got the job.

That's basically my Ballardian claim to fame - I used to do JG Ballard's old job at 'Chemistry & Industry'. Well, more or less - he was deputy editor, a role that didn't exist in my time, while I was production assistant and reporter. The magazine was still at the same premises on Belgrave Square, surrounded by the same pubs and curved balconies of concrete hotels, and my desk was certainly old enough to pre-date the 1950s. I felt a certain kinship.

The one time I met the man himself was in February 1998 at the ICA, where he was talking about movies with David Leland. Afterwards, Ballard stayed on stage to chat with anyone who wanted to jump up and say hello, even as the ICA staff tried to clear the room for the next event. I said I was doing his old job and showed him my business card. He briefly reminisced about his own time there, and seemed genuinely pleased and interested to hear how things were going, some four decades after.

My plan to follow in his footsteps by rapidly finishing an acclaimed novel or two, then quitting work to write in creative seclusion, never quite worked out. But he remained an inspiration, in work and life. That long-unfinished first novel definitely bears his influence (along with Norman Mailer, another recent loss), though possibly not in ways detectable to anyone else. As an intensely visual writer, he's also a constant presence when I'm out taking photographs. Whether in stories or pictures, that influence comes from his unique way of seeing - that forensic examination of the landscapes of the late 20th century, the disasters and psychopathologies, the art and the technology. That medically-trained analysis of the nature of the catastrophe, and the acceptance of it all.

Ballard's also proved a near-infallible guide to a parallel world of literature (though, personally, I still can't be bothered with Self or Amis Jr). Any book I might find while scavenging secondhand shops which carries an adulatory blurb from the man gets added to the pile. Equally, I've found various writers (from Nathanael West to John Gray) by other routes and been greatly impressed by them, only later finding that they're also favourites of Ballard's. And of course you could build a library out of the many other writers, artists, musicians and film-makers who've acknowledged their deep debts to the man.

Unlike many of the other folk adding their tributes here, I'm not a literary critic or academic (nor, to be honest, would I wish to be). I'm a fan, though I wish there was another word for that. And through my developing fascination with the man's work, I've been privileged to meet, drink, and make friends with a whole bunch of fantastically creative and intelligent people, of all ages and professions, from as near as Sheffield to as far as Australia, who've all been equally enthused in their own idiosyncratic ways.

Apart from the infinitely explorable mass of his writing, I think maybe that's the legacy of JG Ballard - the dispersed generations of people who might call themselves, in whatever sense, Ballardians. The readers for whom his writing and his vision just made sense. The saddest realisation is that there'll be no more.



Pics: (Top) Set of photos by Donovan Wylie for an unpublished magazine profile of JG Ballard, on show at the 'Autopsia del nou Mil.leni' exhibition at CCCB, Barcelona, October 2008.
(Above) JG Ballard's childhood home at 31a Amherst Avenue in Shanghai's old international settlement, now the SH508 restaurant, October 2008.

And back

I'm back from the visit to San Diego, more or less refreshed after another temporally disorienting brace of flights (left the hotel 4am Sunday, home at 8am Monday). A very worthwhile and enjoyable trip, though, meeting everyone from the Mayor to a bunch of dudes making environmentally-friendly surfboards (possibly the most Californian business imaginable). I'll be doing a full write-up for Cleantech Magazine. There's more pics from the trip on my Flickr stream.

In the meanwhile, Cleantech's latest Infocus publication features another article by myself on venture capital investment in smart grid companies, an area that was high on the agenda in San Diego where the local utility is gearing up to install some 1.4 million smart meters in homes. Also due out is the latest annual review from Private Equity International with my review of the European mid-market; and, next week, another technology focus section for Crain's Manchester Business, looking at smart tech investment in a downturn and also featuring an unexpected bit of Hollywood glamour.

Gone west

I'm in San Diego for a few days meeting various bods in the local cleantech industry, so if you need to get in touch please drop me an email rather than trying to phone.

The combination of the length of transit (Manchester to Chicago then, some hours later, on to California) and the progressive time difference reliably produces strange psychological effects - it's like one of those bad time-twisting dreams where you're in some dull or unpleasant situation until a certain time, only the clock keeps moving backwards... Still, got a good way into Pynchon 'Against the Day' (which starting as it does with an airship setting off for Chicago, seemed very appropriate), and spending several hours flying into the sunset was good, as was the sight of Phoenix lit up at night. US cities tend to look fascinatingly dull from the air, all regular grid and flatness. San Diego itself looked a lot more interesting on the final descent - hills and windy bits. I've Saturday to explore, before doing the whole trip in reverse over Sunday and early Monday.

But now it's half ten at night, or possible half six tomorrow morning. Time to turn in, anyroad. I may be more lucid tomorrow.

Crisp news

The Business Desk brings good news combining two of my abiding interests - Yorkshireness and savoury snacks.
Yorkshire Crisps, based in Wales (the one just the other side of Sheffield, that is), has won a distribution deal with Sainsburys. Best of all, the deal includes their new Henderson's Yorkshire Sauce flavour, based on that immortal relish brewed just across the street from where I was born. I had a pack yesterday, and they're very tasty indeed. A fair bit classier than Seabrook's, they're probably better suited to munching with a glass of chilled wine from Leventhorpe than with the traditional pint. Mmm.

Christmas message

Click for bigger. Festive greetings to all!

The Road to Huddersfield

Sometimes, a good poke around a secondhand bookshop will turn up something that just leaps off the shelf at you. So it was with 'The Road to Huddersfield: A Journey to Five Continents'. A book commissioned by the World Bank from Guardian journalist James (later Jan) Morris in the early 1960s, with a delightfully Yorkshire-centric title - what's not to like?

Huddersfield here is posited as the exemplar of industrialised society, the epitome of 20th century civilisation, the very birthplace of the modern world, whose 'horny, stocky, taciturn people were the first to live by chemical energies, by steam, cogs, iron and engine grease, and the first in modern times to demonstrate the dynamism of the human condition'. Aye, that's right enough.

The assigned task of the World Bank was then (and, more or less, is now) to help those less advanced nations advance along the titular road to Huddersfield - to fund those infrastructure projects which, according to theory, will speed those economies towards the wealth and freedom from want of industrial society, that very state of Huddersfieldness.

After a visit to the World Bank HQ, under the idiosyncratic rule of Eugene Black, Morris travels through some of the recipients of the Bank's aid - Ethiopia, Siam, southern Italy, Colombia, and the Indian-Pakistani borders - in an elegant and picturesque odyssey. Given that the book was commissioned by the Bank, Morris stays remarkably ambiguous about the effects and efficacy of its work - a lot kinder than many of its latter-day (or even contemporary) critics, but no apologist for its occasional incompetence or amorality.

Some 45 years on, some of the descriptions of the countries visited strike a little odd. 'Nobody is starving' in Ethopia, though that country 'is still a long, long way from Huddersfield'. Further East, 'it is no coincidence that Burma, that gilded stronghold of Buddhism, is perhaps the only country on earth that shows no eagerness at all to take the Huddersfield Road." On the other hand, the chapter detailing political and ethnic tensions in the Indus basin seems ever relevant - though some might see a certain irony as Morris notes of Pakistan, 'never did a country seem to need her Huddersfield more.'

It all makes for an intriguing slice of political and economic history. Although it seems slightly unfair that the book's thin section of photographic plates does not show the titular Yorkshire town, but rather its neighbour Halifax - a view from Beacon Hill of a near-unrecognisable forest of belching chimneys. Were it not for the dark satanic smog, now long gone, you might just see my house from there.

Plagiarism of the robot pumpkin Daleks

With the research assistance of the wife (an actual doctor of robotics and such), I've uncovered a quite shocking case of academic plagiarism.

The University of Essex is flaunting its creation of what can only be described as a robotic pumpkin Dalek, to be formally revealed today on that important outlet for research dissemination, the Richard and Judy show.

But the robo-wrangling missus has a nose for prior art, and has called shenanigans! There's this from a year ago on Crafty Crafty. Even more shockingly, the original research dates from even earlier, as per this posting on Flickr -


Back to your robot laboratories, so-called researchers of Essex, and get on with the important work of meddling with things with which man should not meddle with. And to the rest of you, happy Halloween.

[photos copyright University of Essex; 'oskay']

Terminal inactivity

Doesn't time fly? To prove I've not been totally inactive over the past month or so (government work - I'll say no more), here's a sort of photographic essay, exploring the terrain west of London through a thick filter of HG Wells and JG Ballard:

What we saw of the destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton.

Pace Egg play

On Friday (Good Friday, that is), we took ourselves up to Heptonstall for the first of the day's performances of the Pace Egg Play. The play's been traced back to the 1500s or so, but the obvious pagan roots suggest rather older roots. The current version has just been running since 1979 but, as this BBC story from last year relates, it's as close to the old play as possible given the effects of time and memory.

It's a rollicking performance, anyway. Many of the towns and villages on both sides of the Pennines have their own version, performed at Easter or new year, but Heptonstall's is reckoned to be one of the best in the 'combat' mode of the play.

More pics of the action over on my Flickr page.

(Apologies for the lack of recent action on this blog, by the way - I've been tied up recently on a contract with the Environment Agency, but the (un)usual service should be resumed soonish.)

Graduation day

Here's me just officially graduated with the MA in Economics and Finance, with Distinction, at the University of Sheffield. (Photo by the wife, on a rather dingy day.)

I was quite proud to share the stage with Nicholas Stern, who was receiving an honorary doctorate for his work in development and environmental economics. The 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change played a large part in my own dissertation.

Mark of distinction

Just received word from Sheffield Uni - my dissertation on a possible clean energy bubble, as outlined below, got a First Class grade. Which means I get the MA in Economics and Finance with Distinction. Which is nice.

'Climate hoax' advocates hoaxed

News, via Reuters, of an entertaining hoax on a certain group of conspiracy theorists -
A hoax scientific study pointing to ocean bacteria as the overwhelming cause of global warming fooled some sceptics on Thursday who doubt growing evidence that human activities are to blame.
Laden with scientific jargon and published online in the previously unknown "Journal of Geoclimatic Studies" based in Japan, the report suggested the findings could be "the death of manmade global warming theory".
Sceptics jumped on the report. A British scientist e-mailed the report to 2,000 colleagues before spotting it was a spoof. Another from the US called it a "blockbuster".

A wee bit of investigation finds that the supposed journal site is registered to one David Thorpe, who comics geeks of a certain age will remember as the creator of Doc Chaos, and is now apparently an environmental journalist.

Nice work, AuThorpe! Though next time it might be an idea to use an anonymous site registration service to help keep the joke going a little longer. Still, it seems to have put the wind up the wingnuts anyway.

UPDATE, Friday pm: Thorpe's acknowledged his involvement, but says he didn't write it himself:
I did not write the content of the site. Someone else did. I designed the site because I was asked to by someone who knew I would be sympathetic to the joke. I appreciate it looks as though I wrote it. I even wish I had written it, because it's very funny. But I didn't.
Fair play.

UPDATE, Monday 12/11: Thorpe's written an extensive and elegant blog post about the reasons for and response to the hoax:
What the hoax showed is that there are many people willing to jump on anything that supports their argument, whether it's true or not.
What we wanted to emphasise is that it's necessary to achieve scientific validity using the peer-review model. Proper climate science makes every attempt to do this, and is a constantly evolving and self-refining process, as all science is.
So, when commentator posted on my blog - sarcastically - "....And we do all have to go with the "scientific consensus" don't we?" - I can only say, if we haven't got the scientific consensus then what have we got?
Meanwhile, Nature snares an interview with the still-anonymous author of the fake paper:
Its purpose was to expose the credulity and scientific illiteracy of many of the people who call themselves climate sceptics. While dismissive of the work of the great majority of climate scientists, they will believe almost anything if it lends support to their position. Their approach to climate science is the opposite of scepticism.

Football, another Sheffield invention

I'm not much of one for football, but the 150th anniversary of Sheffield FC can't be ignored. The world's first football club, Sheffield basically set the rules for the FA and created the modern globalised game. That the beautiful game was made in Sheffield is probably the one footballing fact that both Blades and Owls have ever agreed on.

And personally, I'm very glad to settle one question I've always wondered about - if they were the first team, who did they play against?
Members organised themselves into teams for matches such as Married Men versus Unmarried Men, and Professional Occupations versus The Rest, apparently.

The anniversary celebrations also mean that the club's current fixtures list reads a little differently:
Grantham Town
Spalding United
Stocksbridge Park Steels
Inter Milan FC
Carlton Town

Flickr of danger

Having joined the digital age with the new Canon, I've also signed up with the Flickr photo-sharing site thingummy. There's a permanent link over the right there. I've just put up a few pics from a weekend visit to the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, including the above. Quite a nice response from the camera in pretty low-light conditions.

In other news, here's my brother at one extreme of the automotive safety and efficiency debate.

M62 diversion

Liverpudlian vicar John Davies is a man on an epic journey across an everyday landscape - he's walking the M62. A couple of years ago, I got in touch with John after he blogged about my Halifax Slasher article in Strange Attractor Journal.

This Saturday, John stopped off in Halifax and I gave him the tour of the town, taking in the sights - the Wainhouse tower, the gibbet, Dean Clough, the bridges, etc - as well as the sites of some of the most notable Slasher attacks (or, rather, 'attacks' - read the article, or this brief introduction). John's written about it here. And now I'm writing about it here.

The virtual world of blogging might often be a self-obsessed and insular one, but it can help you meet new friends and even, just occasionally, get you out into the fresh air.

Where there's a will

A magnificently inarguable headline from the Yorkshire Post:
Man who left Tories £8m in his will was 'deluded and insane'

Actually, it turns out to be quite a sad story, and the Tories probably aren't doing themselves many favours by fighting the family for the money.

Fopp flops, and other pop shop ops

Following the collapse of the Fopp chain, the Guardian reports on the prospects for the good old high street music store. It's a pretty bleak view, for all the usual reasons of internet shopping, downloads and supermarket discounting. However, as reporter Adam Webb notes:
it is beyond the mainstream that things get really interesting. A few hundred yards into Soho are a score of different worlds: the specialist retailers. Take the dance and electronic music specialist Phonica. Tastefully decked out in wood and with a Perspex bubble chair in the window, it is defiantly leftfield, with 90% of its sales coming from vinyl.
These days, a small independent store dabbling in anything remotely mainstream would be commercial suicide[...]
a Central Line trip to Brick Lane in east London finds the most optimistic view of the independent record store. This is where Rough Trade will open its ambitious superstore later this month, after closing its minuscule Covent Garden branch. The 5,000 sq ft space will incorporate a coffee shop, a "snug" (in other words a lounging area, with free wi-fi) and a performance space. The aim, says store director Stephen Godfroy, is to "rediscover the joy of browsing" - connecting retail with the overall music experience, and attracting en masse the sort of fans who will pay a premium for this kind of service and recommendation.

A worthy aim, and probably the best bet for keeping record shops alive (I write here as someone who's previously been accused of keeping Manchester's Piccadilly Records afloat through my vinyl habit). The irony is that one of my all-time favourite friendly independent record shops was, some ten years ago or more, Fopp in Edinburgh.

OK, so Fopp accelerated its growth by changing its emphasis from having a real quality and depth of product to a pile-em-high/sell-em-cheap philosophy, but it lost something of its soul in the process. They did remain probably the best of the chains, and I was certainly no stranger to their Sheffield store (preferred it when it was the Warp shop, of course), but they did seem to bite off more than they could chew when they bought the Music Zone chain out of administration earlier this year. The two chains always made for an interesting comparison - while their basic model was very similar, Fopps were usually pretty pleasant, vaguely cool places to shop, while Music Zones were simply awful, with the fly-by-night air of a permanent closing-down sale.

The Sheff Fopp had even started stocking vinyl again. I reckon this is probably a necessary feature to attract the serious music shopper - its superior sound quality aside, flicking through racks of CDs (click click click click) just isn't the same.

Not a number

Last weekend, during a break in partly-sunny Snowdonia, we spent an afternoon at Portmeirion. This, of course, was the main location for the wife's favourite TV series, The Prisoner.

Here's some photos we took, in between shaking our fists at the oppressive sky and declaring our existential liberties.

The Bell Tower, seen in many episodes.

Here I stand where Halifax's own Eric Portman stood, to deliver his election address as Number Two in the Free For All episode.

And here's where Number Six delivered his address: "You will all die like rotten cabbages!"

The Old Peoples Home (in real life, the hotel) and the Stone Boat.

Thanks go to Catherine Nemeth Frumerman for her On the Trail of the Prisoner booklet.

So it goes

Sad news of the death of Kurt Vonnegut, that most humanist, humorous and bleak of writers.

His suggested last words for mankind, to be carved into a wall of the Grand Canyon for the benefit of later visitors, still seem as relevant as ever they were:
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap."

Einstein no-no

I've felt obliged to add a special note to one of the most popular pages on the main 2ubh site, a feature I wrote two years ago entitled 'The other side of Albert Einstein'. The note reads as follows:

This article is consistently the most visited on this site. It was commissioned by Physics World as part of a special issue celebrating the start of the International Year of Physics in 2005. The year was also known as Einstein Year, marking as it did the centenary of of his groundbreaking work in Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and special relativity.
The brief was to examine the various myths and accusations which have been levelled at Einstein. Of these, perhaps the most pernicious is that Einstein was a fraud. As noted below, this accusation is particularly prevalent among racists who can't accept a liberal Jewish genius.
It's slightly annoying, then, to find that this article has been selectively referenced and linked to by a number of right-wing and neo-nazi sites, so as to suggest that it supports their idiotic ideas. It doesn't in any way.
I'll simplify the basic message of the article for anyone with such an agenda: Einstein was certainly a genius, but he was in other ways a typically flawed human being. You, on the other hand, are an idiot. Now grow the fuck up.
To everyone else, I hope you enjoy the article.
- TC

It's sad that it had to be said, really.

Economic genre fiction

Interesting radio piece by Rick Kleffel for NPR in the US on a perceived trend for 'genre fiction' (SF, horror, etc) to draw on economics and finance. From the NPR blurb:
During the Cold War, science-fiction tales of alien invasion mirrored society's fear of Communism, and monsters from Frankenstein to Godzilla have tapped into our unease about the boundaries of science.
But a new type of genre fiction has plots centering around business and economics. A book by T. C. Boyle takes the subject of identity theft and treats it like a horror story.
Several other writers are also turning their attention to our preoccupation with finances and business, and finding fertile ground.
More here.

I'm not convinced by the claim that this is anything new (economics in SF goes back to Wells at least) and the focus here is very much on micro or personal finance issues rather than anything broader, but it's an interesting listen.

Yule blog

A slightly menacing Santa snapped at Stuttgart Weihnachtsmarkt this last weekend.
I also liked this juxtaposition outside the Kunstmuseum.


And, for the traditionalists, some scenes from the Esslingen market:


Fröhliche Weihnachten to all!

Exploring Jessops

The Sheffield Star is today raising controversy about 'urban explorers' entering local landmarks including Jessops Hospital, where I was born. To be fair, it's a pretty balanced piece, with the expected condemnatory quotes balanced by a bit of context from the explorer chaps:
One Sheffield explorer, who did not wish to be named but was on the visits to both Sheffield Cathedral and Jessop Hospital, said: "We normally visit places which are going to disappear and are a part of our history.
"The cathedral was a bit different. It was a unique opportunity to see the city centre from a different perspective. We never damage anything. Breaking in is something we would not do. Our motto is 'take only photographs and leave only footprints'."
"There is an element of risk but we take all precautions we can. It's worth it to see places which are so important and could be lost."

Not the sort of behaviour one should publicly condone, of course - but the pictures are intriguing. The explorer, DBS, notes: You'll find it tough to get in though if your waist is more than 30" and you can't shimmy drainpipes. I suspect I won't be joining them, then.

Latest on Sheffield University's plans for the site -
This next phase will see us refurbish and bring back to life the historic Victorian Wing of the old Jessop hospital building and build a landmark new building on the west corner of the same site.
These developments will provide new homes for the departments of Music, English, Law and History, and provide outstanding facilities for staff and students across the University.
The department of Music will move into the Victorian wing, once the careful refurbishment of this Grade II listed building is complete, whilst English, Law and History will all move into the new landmark building on the west corner of the site.
The new landmark building has been designed by Sauerbruch Hutton, award winning architects renowned for delivering iconic buildings, with environmental sustainability as a top priority. Sauerbruch Hutton won the contract as part of an internal architecture competition held by the University last year.
More here.

All mouth and trousers

Like any journalist, I'm generally concerned with words, phrases, and their meanings. Generally, I write what I mean to say. If an editor or sub-editor tries to change what I wrote into something that I didn't mean, I get annoyed.

One minor but deeply aggravating example is if I use the delightful expression 'all mouth and trousers' (as I did in this feature for Real Deals on the Northern private equity market a few years ago) only to have some gormless sub in London try and change it to 'all mouth and no trousers'.

The 'no trousers' version, I have found, is a much more recent bastardisation of the original, which has become predominant in London and the South of England. It loses the precise eloquence of the original. I assume it's by confusion with phrases such as 'all talk and no action' (or, another favourite, 'fur coat and no knickers'), but such confusion only seems to demonstrate the failings that the original phrase mocks. 'Talk' and 'mouth' may be metonyms, but 'action' and 'trousers' certainly ain't - and if you think they are, that might say something about you.

Nevertheless, the bastardised form continues to crop up in the London-based mass media, causing me no small degree of irritation and chuntering at each occasion. In a perhaps quixotic attempt to reverse this trend, I've launched a new campaigning blog to promote and preserve the original.

It might seem a rather minor concern to some, but it is an issue that has inspired deeply-felt and loudly-expressed exchanges of opinion in the past. I hope that all who read this blog, and my work elsewhere, will support this cause by using the expression in its traditional and more eloquent form as often as possible.

Psychophysics, according to Hoyle

Intriguing letter in last week's Nature on how an aside in the great Fred Hoyle's early SF novel The Black Cloud proved hugely influential in perceptual research -

The characters in the book discover an ominous black cloud that appears to be heading towards Earth. Will the cloud hit Earth and, if so, when? The first question is solved when the characters examine the relative speed at which the cloud is translating across the night sky to the rate at which it is looming, or seeming to get larger. The second question is tackled with a bit of impromptu algebra in which the time until impact is calculated from the ratio of the current size of the cloud to its rate of change. A mathematical derivation of the formula is provided.
A footballer wishing to head an approaching ball needs to know where the ball is going relative to the head, and when it will hit or pass the head. The player could estimate the trajectory of the ball from knowledge of its position and velocity. However, David Lee realized in the 1970s that the brain can use the ratio of size to its rate of change, previously identified by Hoyle, to estimate the imminence of arrival. David Regan realized soon afterwards that the brain can use the ratio of lateral speed to looming rate to calculate where an object is travelling. [...]
Since the early work of Lee and Regan, a considerable amount of research in areas including psychophysics, motor action, neurophysiology and computational modelling has followed. The whole body of work that exists today can be traced back to a casual footnote and a couple of sketches in a science-fiction novel.

Ballard on Ballardian

Over at Ballardian, Simon Sellars has just published the results of his interview with the big man himself. With a little background research and question suggestions from myself, I modestly add.

It's a great interview - steering clear of the Shepperton/ironic suburbanism/Shanghai childhood tropes recycled by every newspaper and TV profile, while avoiding the fannish trivia that emerges when, say, broadsheet hacks of a certain age interview Bob Dylan.

There's even a surprising divergence into economic history, in response to a question about whether the obscure English pride in its 'world-class hooligans' (something relevant to the themes of Kingdom Come) is a response to the loss of Empire -
I’m not sure it has anything to do with that. The British Empire was lost a long time ago, and most British people didn’t benefit directly from Empire. In fact, there are economic historians who claim we made a loss from the British Empire — that it cost more than we gained from it. Most British people didn’t share in the Empire at all, and I don’t think the loss of all these possessions scattered around the world was a tragedy for the British. It was probably a relief when it collapsed.
‘British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion’ by PJ Cain and AG Hopkins (Longman, 1993) is the definitive text on that subject - always knew that 'Development of the British Economy' course would come in useful...

Simon also asks Ballard about his political leanings, something that causes irregular outbursts of bullshitting over on the JGB email group:
You once said you were becoming more left-wing as you got older. Does that still fit?
I think it probably does, actually. I don’t know about Australia — it strikes me as a pretty wonderful place, from everything I’ve read about it — but here, the gap between rich and poor is widening to such an extent that, particularly in London, it’s begun to shift the whole demographic. The middle class, the people who sustain modern society — the nurses, junior doctors, teachers, civil servants and so on — are being forced out because vast sums of money are pouring into the housing market and distorting it. Gated communities are springing up everywhere, and the moment they can, people are opting for private medicine, private teaching, private hospitals — cutting themselves off from the rest of society, and that’s not a healthy development. One thing I’ve always liked about America, and I think it’s probably true of Australia, is that the children of well-to-do people and the children of people on modest incomes go to the same schools. I think that’s good. It’s not true over here and that’s bad! A class-ridden society with huge divisions — that’s bad. Something ought to be done about it, but I’ll leave that to another generation.

Blogging Sinclair

My interview with Iain Sinclair (as trailered below) went up last week on Ballardian.com. It's had a pretty positive response from readers and the wider blogpond - Ballardian site editor Simon Sellars reckons it's the site's most popular post in its 18 months of publishing.

It's been an interesting experience for me for two reasons. First, this kind of literary interview is a world away from my usual work, the bread-and-butter writing on business, tech and corporate finance issues. Which isn't to say that there isn't as much enjoyment or stimulation to (occasionally) be had from those areas - or even to say that they're entirely unrelated, particularly with regards to the urban regeneration/redevelopment beat and some of Sinclair's concerns - but it's good to know I can still hack a different furrow. I like having a range of subjects, and this just might potentially lead to other things in the same arena. At least, that's my justification for doing this job gratis, other than getting the chance to sit and talk for an hour with one of my favourite writers, about another of my favourite writers.

Second, this is the first major piece I've written for first publication on the web since blogs became an integral feature of the net - such things were not around back when I was knocking out features for Venturedome.com. It's great to see something being published almost as soon as it's written (well, within a week or so anyway, given that I had to get the photos developed and Simon had to find time to lay it all out) rather than the month or more of most magazine schedules, and to get immediate feedback from readers. I'm particularly proud of the chap who said he'd spent his entire morning reading the interview and checking out the links rather than working. And it's been interesting to see the piece being picked up by other blogs - some of my favourite reads, like BLDGBLOG, Strange Attractor and Mountain7, as well as a few I'm not familiar with but found via Technorati or Google. It's good to see different people zeroing in on different aspects of the interview - whether Ballard was ever SF, the end of psychogeography, or Sinclair's proposed 'Beijing Orbital' project - and very good to see people vowing to read either more Ballard or more Sinclair.

So am I now a convert to the claims that blogs, or the net in its wider forms, can and should wipe out traditional print journalism? No - at least, not until such media can be as easily accessed, stored, and read on the train or in the bath. And I might be conservative in this regard, but as the writer, seeing your words on screen just isn't the same as seeing them on paper.

To wrap up, it seems a shame to waste this unused shot from the Barbican -

Heads of regeneration

I stumbled across this huge semi-submerged head of Alfred Hitchcock while flaneuring around London last week. It's at the centre of the redeveloped Gainsborough Studios, just on the Hackney side of the canal off New North Road, where the great sadist made many of his early pictures.

When I lived in London, I lived for a while in a flat just the other side of Shoreditch Park. The old studios were, then, derelict - an empty but imposing complex of 1920s brick sheds, still steeped in character. I thought I had some decent pics of them from back then, but this is the best I can find -

It was a bit of a shock to see what they'd become. I knew the site was up for redevelopment, but assumed that they'd be keeping some vestige of the old brick studios. But it's another bit of history and atmosphere that's been lost - big sculptural head aside, the flats themselves could be anywhere, by a canal in Leeds or Manchester, or maybe Oslo or Barcelona (except they probably wouldn't cost quite as much anywhere else).

Still, such nostaligia is probably anathema to the spirit of the excellent Future Cities exhibition at the Barbican, at which I arrived after a few detours via Bunhill Fields and St Mary Ax. This takes in everything from Debord's first psychogeographique maps of Paris, through Archigram and Koolhaas, to Will Alsop's vision of Barnsley as a Tuscan hill village. (And speaking of Yorkshire reinventions, Urban Splash's previously discussed proposals for regenerating Sheffield's infamous Park Hill flats have finally been approved by the council.)

I then met with the brilliant writer Iain Sinclair for an interview, primarily about the influence of JG Ballard on his own work, but also taking in such concerns about architecture and place, the subject of his upcoming London: City of Disappearances. The full interview will be appearing shortly at Ballardian.com, but as a taster, here's Sinclair's thoughts on regenerations such as the Gainsborough's:
"The whole of the canal has undergone this Ballardian process, whereby all the warehouses have been turned into loft living for City folk. It is actually a city, it's a water city even though the canal is decaying into a drought-like condition, undergoing hideous transformations and being choked with weed, but along it is somewhere that is nowhere."

Stone Age Economics

Just been reading the intriguingly-titled Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins. This one's been sat on my shelf for a year or two since I picked it up at a Fortean Times Unconvention, but I was finally spurred to read the damned thing after it was referenced in Clifford Conner's excellent A People's History of Science.

It's not as wacky as it might sound (as someone asked at the Uncon - 'What's that about, exchange rates for pebbles?'). My copy is a first British edition from 1974, but it appears to still be in print.

It's more a work of anthropology and sociology than economics, though. The opening chapter, 'The Original Affluent Society' (a slightly different version of which is available on various websites like this one), riffs on Galbraith to argue that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was more than adequate to meet all the needs of its members with just a few hours' labour a day. It's an obviously appealing idea as a riposte to the work-hard/spend-hard ethos of late capitalism.

Vernon Smith, the Nobel-winning experimental economist who I interviewed a few years ago, has written on prehistoric and hunter-gatherer economics, and also concluded that they generally enjoyed plentiful food and a far-from-Hobbesian life. I've also found a recent paper by Charles Kenny of the World Bank (available as a pdf from the Brookings Institution) which asks "Were People in the Past Poor and Miserable?" - Kenny concludes they generally weren't any more miserable than people today (and maybe less so), and suggests a re-examination of the economic doctrines that rising incomes mean more happiness (or 'utility' as economists call that nice warm feeling you get from satisfying your wants). It's another angle to current interest in the economics of happiness, something I've touched on before.

Back to the Sahlins book - the following chapters argue that 'primitive' economies operated at far below their production possibilities to meet their own needs, though production intensifies to meet the extra demands of a tribal chief when such arises. There's also a lengthy exegesis about gifts and exchanges in a pre-monetary society, derived from Mauss' 'Essay on the Gift' - this is all rather steeped in 60s sociology-speak, and didn't quite hold my interest. Throughout, contemporary 'primitive' and hunter-gatherer societies are used as a proxy for prehistoric ones (something Conner also does in the early parts of his history) - I don't know how valid this actually is, but there's some fascinating notes on the traditions and practices of various tribes. The book ends with a briefer consideration of primitive trade, and the emergence of exchange rates for pigs, pots, axes and spears (if not pebbles).

Radical history

The Guardian (who else?) is launching a campaign to better commemorate Britain's long history of radical political and democratic activity. Media-friendly historian Tristram Hunt kicks off with his own nominations of events and sites that deserve monuments, including Manchester's Peterloo Massacre, the signing of the National Covenant in Edinburgh, and key scenes from the Chartist movement.

Hunt notes, with regards to the BBC's Restoration programme:
But there is another story of Britain's heritage which this picture-postcard take on the past is studiously ignoring. While Restoration Village shores up rural pastiche - complete with dry-stone walls and a warm, feudal glow of noblesse oblige - Britain's more exciting, more radical heritage is once again being by-passed in the search for funds and fame.
...
The stories, monuments and myths that traditionally linked progressives with their heroic past have steadily retreated from public consciousness. This amounts to something akin to a loss of collective memory. And so it should come as no surprise that we have difficulty rallying any broader, popular enthusiasm for our political process when we lack an appreciation of our democratic heritage.

It's a useful adjunct to the History Matters campaign which, with high-profile backers such as Boris Johnson and David Starkey (though Hunt and Tony Benn were also among the founders), can appear to be promoting an 'official' institutional version of histor, as per the Telegraph's interpretation -
Without a sense of history, we are not a nation, simply a random set of individuals born to another random set of individuals. Lose the thread that links us to our institutions and we lose ourselves. [...] Unless we know who the Stuart kings were, when they ascended to their thrones, and the main events of their reigns, the outlook of the contemporary peasant loses its reference points.

There's certainly appetite for history about all those radical events despised by the Telegraphs of their day. Here in Halifax last weekend, there was a healthy turnout for a Chartist Festival celebrating the lives and works of local figures. We joined in a walk around key scenes from the Chartist-backed Plug Plot of 1842, including the rallying ground on Skircoat Moor and the site of a pitched battle between mounted soldiers and workers down the hill at Salterhebble (just by the Shell garage and drive-through Macdonalds). I briefly mentioned the events in the local psychogeographical piece I wrote for Strange Attractor Journal -
On 15 August 1842, probably the largest mob ever seen in Halifax began with a procession of four or five thousand Chartist marchers entering across North Bridge from Bradford, a famished-looking mob armed with bludgeons, flails, pitchforks and pikes. Another march of five thousand entered the town from Skircoat Moor, where they'd spent the night. That group had come across from Lancashire, swelling in number as it came, closing the mills as it went by drawing the plugs from the mill boilers. They entered Halifax singing Chartist hymns and the 100th Psalm: "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands." The two groups met and the Riot Act was read. At the height, a mob of some 25,000 people thronged the streets of Halifax.

History worth remembering, I reckon.

Steam powered internet machine

Another great piece of art (or whatever you want to call it) from Jeremy Dellar - an Apple Mac powered by a steam engine. According to the Guardian report, which includes a wee picture of the gizmo, it's a Merryweather boiler from 1945, originally used to pump water for fire engines. A handsome object, the boiler has brass taps, a fine whistle and smart teak cladding.

Dellar, whose previous works include the inspired re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave and brass band arrangements of acid house anthems, is again working with collaborator Alan Kane. The Guardian notes:
There's a marvellous impracticality to the machine. But it does work - unlike the disused Richborough power station, whose cooling towers loom, and the abandoned wind turbine at the end of the field. "We like inverting economics," said Kane, adding, perhaps unnecessarily: "This is a very uneconomic way of having a portable computer."

Not that coal-fired computers are a great idea for mass use, what with greenhouse gases and all. Here at 2ubh, all our hardware runs off the wind and the sun. Really.

The steam-powered internet machine is touring Kent this month.

On experts

Another fun wee column from John Kay in the Financial Times, summarising Philip Tetlock’s new book Expert Political Judgment -

Isaiah Berlin, historian of ideas, made a distinction between the intelligence of the hedgehog – which knows one big thing – and the intelligence of the fox – which knows many little things. Hedgehogs fit what they learn into a world view. Foxes improvise explanations case by case. The world needs both but today it needs fewer hedgehogs and more foxes. Berlin’s terms are used to describe styles of reasoning by the American psychologist Philip Tetlock, who has spent 20 years asking pundits to predict who will win elections, what countries will acquire nuclear weapons or enter the European Union and how the first Gulf war would end. He has tested 30,000 predictions from 300 experts against outcomes.
Mr Tetlock finds that his respondents are not very good. They do better than a chimp who answers at random, but not much, and worse than simple forecasting rules based on extrapolation. But some pundits are better than others. A little knowledge is helpful. Dilettantes – people with the information you will acquire from diligent reading of this newspaper – do much better than undergraduates who based their judgment on a one-page summary of the issues. But experts have little advantage over dilettantes. The reputation of the experts is a guide to which are worth following. But not in the way you might expect. Bad forecasters are consulted more frequently than good ones. The more famous the expert, the worse his prognostications.

Kay's own new book on business strategy, The Hare and the Tortoise, is also recently published. Must remember to seek out and buy.

Occult rich of Cameroon

Another piece of African economic research sponsored by NWO in the Netherlands.

PhD researcher Basile Ndjio has examined the so-called Feymen of Cameroon, young men from a poor immigrant background who have grown rich through tantalisingly unspecified 'occult' methods of swindling. According to the NWO press release:
Swindlers in Cameroon, with expensive cars and flashy clothes, are the embodiment of occult economies. These nouveau rich mostly come from poor backgrounds with few prospects. 'Feymania', as the Cameroonians refer to the swindling practices, are often interpreted in terms of magic and witchcraft. And as they are so rich many hold them in awe, to the extent that the new generation has even adopted them as role models.

More here, from the University of Amsterdam:
Ndjio concludes firstly that the popularization of feymania-related activities as well as the idealization of feymen as role models is the result of the lack of employment perspectives for urban youths, the marginalization of the youth by state power, people’s disenchantment with the democratization process of the early 1990s, and the steady loss of social prestige of the évolués-fonctionnaires (civil servants, and educated elites at large).
Secondly, both the vilification of feymen as mokoagne men (rich sorcerers) and the depreciation of their extraordinary riches as a mokoagne moni (occult or magic money) are informed by moralizing discourses that condemn asocial modes of wealth accumulation and consumption that do not correspond to accepted patterns of self-realisation and social norms.

Intriguing from both an economic and a fortean point of view.

The car crash came into its own

Despite appearances, these aren't, strictly speaking, new additions to the Ballardian photo file. The presence of high rise apartment blocks, the skeletal outline of a half-constructed institutional building, the bleak urban highway - these are just coincidence. This is, however, the scene of a crash, though hardly one to excite Dr Vaughan.

At the end of March, immediately after passing over the Brook Hill roundabout by the University of Sheffield, a truck belonging to the venerable H Askey Transport firm (aka Arundel Motors), drifted without singalling from one lane of the Netherthorpe Road dual carriageway to the other, neatly removing the front corner of my Saab. There were fortunately no injuries - and, contrary to the expectations of casual readers of Ballard, no sexual frissons to speak of.
The other party are contesting my claim for repair costs, hence these photos, taking several weeks after the event, for the benefit of the solicitors. The aerial photography available at Google Maps is also proving valuable in countering the other party's claim that lane priorities around the roundabout are other than what they actually are.

The building visible at extreme left of this picture, as it happens, is the new Sheffield Bioincubator, a new "purpose built facility providing the ideal environment for entrepreneurial bioscience to flourish into successful business". It's built in the grounds of the old Jessops Women's Hospital, where I was born. Mr Ballard, I suspect, could hardly have selected a more fitting location for this minorly fateful intersection of trajectories.

Architectural conjecture

I've contributed a few questions to a forthcoming interview for Ballardian.com with Geoff Manaugh of the excellent BLDG BLOG site.

BLDG BLOG describes itself as concerned with architectural conjecture, urban speculation and landscape futures - often beautifully illustrated ruminations on (post)modernist, derelict and speculative architecture, its social and psychological implications, and the ineffable beauty thereof. A mission statement of sorts:
We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard and the international warehousing strategies of Bechtel than we do from Le Corbusier. The good city form of tomorrow is a refugee camp built by Brown & Root; the world’s largest architectural client is the U.S. Department of Defense. More people now live in overseas military camps than in houses designed by Mies van der Rohe – yet we study Mies van der Rohe.

The interview will be concentrating, mostly, on exploring Manaugh's admirable fixation on Ballard, and the psychopathological implications of architecture as explored in his prophetic novel High Rise. Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending? Find out when the full interview appears on Ballardian.com shortly.

Mountain 7

Recommended reading (and listening) at the Mountain 7 blog, where the cultured man of mystery known there only as 'the poacher' has generously added this blog to their links column - under the 'Theory, Culture & Politics' heading, in the flattering company of Craig Murray, Frank Furedi, John Pilger and Strange Attractor.

Mountain 7 contains an intriguing mix of literature, philosophy, architecture and music (with its own mini radio feed too), often with a Ballardian tinge. A recent post titled Dancing to architecture gives a good flavour -
I seem to be uncovering sites exploring the abandoned and the disused more everyday. I wonder what this might mean. Two things spring to mind: the obvious being, that of course they've always been there and I'm just becoming aware of them (though discovery is always contingent, and not altogether chanceless); the other is a feeling that a more nebulous, but nevertheless perpetual, Romantic fascination with the gothic is coming to the surface, patches appearing beneath the skin. It's as if there is a dual movement away from the present: one towards a garish empty future, a celebrity-led obsession with restoration; the other that seeks refuge in the catacombs of the past (both figurative, and literal) as if that space, in all its crumbling derelict grandeur, is somehow more knowable, or more worthy. I'm not sure I buy my own ramblings here, but there is something in the ghosted secrecy of these places that appeals, and promises a kind of discovery and mystery that the bright gleam of the future denies us...
A consideration of music suitable for such environments follows, including a mention of the superb Canadian improvisational post-rock supergroup Set Fire to Flames.

Reality sometimes overflows

A great philosophical quote from an unlikely source:
"No matter how rigorous our analysis and guidance, reality sometimes overflows the contours that we have defined for it."
- AXA Investment Managers, as reported in the Guardian's City Diary.

Flying saucer flap

Extraordinary front page story in the Guardian today on the 'discovery' of a British Rail patent from the early 1970s for a nuclear-powered flying saucer. The Telegraph, Times, Independent and Sun also ran with the story, albeit in a less prominent position, while the BBC, Register and sundry other sources have picked up on it today.

It's extraordinary mainly because this really isn't news. This same patent, far from being suddenly 'discovered on the website of the European Patent Office by a student', received wide press coverage just a few years ago (I think as part of a Patents Office publicity push, or something similar - annoyingly, I can't find anything in the various archives). It's been in books. A simple google on 'flying saucer' and 'British Rail' turns up references, such as this one from UFO journal Magonia, going back to at least the mid-80s.

Presumably this is in the papers today because someone, somewhere, has put out an agency story or a press release - many of the stories feature the same quotes from people like Colin Pillinger. But are national newspaper journalists - even science specialists like the Guardian's Alok Jha - really too lazy, ignorant or short of time to do the smallest piece of background research? It's stuff like this that gives journos a bad name.

The psychopathy of the new capitalism

I've recently been reading The Culture of the New Capitalism, the latest slim tome from sociologist Richard Sennett. It's based on lectures he gave at Yale in 2004, looking, as the blurb has it, at the major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place.

Sennett picks out several themes from his studies of a particular kind of cutting-edge, new-economy corporate culture, as found in high technology, global finance and new service firms of at least 3000 employees. The key idea is the different cultural environment in these new capitalist entities. Gone is the heirarchical nature of the old corporation which, for all its operational shortcomings, provided everyone involved with a definite sense of purpose and belonging. In its place comes an amorphous structure characterised by casualisation, delayering and nonlinear sequencing - what Sennett rather modishly calls the MP3 player model:
The MP3 machine can be programmed to play only a few bands from its repertoire; similarly, the flexible organisation can select and perform only a few of its many possible functions at any given time [...] Linear development is replaced by a mind-set willing to jump around.

The unintended effect of this, Sennett argues, is an increasing inequality between a small nucleus of core managers and executives (the CPU of the MP3, if you will) and the surrounding nebula of dissociated flexible workers suffering from increasing stress and anxiety. The corporation meanwhile loses the long-term views and institutional knowledge engendered by the old rigid structure.

Only a certain kind of person can prosper in these fragmented institutions, Sennett says:
the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience.

It seems only slightly mischevious to suggest that the ideal character traits for this new economy are not entirely dissimilar to what would usually be regarded as a psychopathic personality: a complete disregard for any sense of social obligation [...] lacking insight and any sense of responsibility or consequence [...] incapable of forming lasting relationships...

The idea will be rather familiar to anyone who's also read much JG Ballard - particularly his 2000 novel, Super-Cannes, in which the corporate elite of a vast ultra-modern business park indulge in carefully managed recreational violence and perversion as a natural part of their working lives.

That's not the only parallel. Sennett considers the 'specter of uselessness' haunting the professional middle class, who can no longer rely on securing a comfortable niche in the corporate entity. Compare with Ballard's Millennium People, where residents of a bourgeois London enclave stage a meaningless revolt against the erosion of their privileged position.

Sennett also ponders the political implications of this socio-economic insecurity in a consumerist culture: Do people shop for politicians in the way they shop at Wal-Mart? [...] The culture of the new capitalism is attunded to singular events, one-off transactions, interventions....
Ballard's latest novel - Kingdom Come, published this autumn - promises to ask whether consumerism can turn into fascism. Or, as his sociopathic psychiatrist in Super-Cannes had it: "The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won't walk out of the desert. They'll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks."

To be fair, I've very selectively quoted from Sennett here to support my own Ballard obsession - it's certainly not as mad as I might have made it sound, but it's still a provocative book that's well worth reading for anyone interested in how corporate culture affects the wider world.

Where's my gazelle?

"As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow ponge silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hasiesh and languidly caressing a pet gazelle."
- William Burroughs, from an unpublished essay in an archive now acquired by the New York Public Library.

I'm sure I used to think something similar too. Sad to say...

Haunts of the Halifax Slasher

Just added to the main features section of the site is a long piece on some of the strangest incidents in the history my home town of Halifax, Yorkshire.

This essay was originally published in Strange Attractor Journal last year, and is presented here with some minor changes (I would still thoroughly recommend buying the original journal, as it's a gem, packed with the odd and inspirational).

The piece, Haunts of the Halifax Slasher, is something of a departure from my usual published work. It's inspired by some of my favourite writers such as Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, and Guy Debord's ideas of psychogeography and dérive - attempts to rediscover and redefine an urban environment through free-floating considerations of the specifics of local history and landscape. Following the examples of Sinclair and Moore in London and Northampton, I've concentrated on Halifax's long and colourful history of violence, hysteria, fear and loathing, as manifest on a walk around and into the town centre.

As the title suggests, the focus of the walk is the strange events of November 1938, when the town lived for in fear of the phantom attacker known as the Slasher (for an introduction to the case, see here). This spins off into other strange and terrible tales, from medieval legends of murderous monks, through the harsh law of the Halifax Gibbet, sundry riots and murders, to more recent incidents asssociated with far-right political activity.

The common thread through much of it is the ease with which rumour and irrationality, fuelled by ignorance, prejudice and social or economic uncertainty, can erupt into psychopathology. None of which is exactly unique to Halifax, but the town's distinct landscape and concentration of strange history makes for an interesting journey.

New Ballard

A synopsis is now up on Amazon for 'Kingdom Come', the latest novel from the great JG Ballard.

The basic plot set-up is (perhaps overly) familiar from his other later novels such as 'Running Wild', 'Cocaine Nights', 'Super-Cannes' and 'Millennium People' - a personal inquiry into a mass-murder in some more or less self-contained community reveals deeper psychological truths about our wider society. But it's a formula that's mostly worked well. This latest one appears to continue the more explicitly contemporary political concerns of 'Millennium People' - the main question here being can consumerism turn into fascism?

Consumerism rules the lives of everyone in the motorway towns, but it is a form of consumerism that co-exists with an obsessive interest in sport and a perverted pride in English nationalism. Racist attacks on immigrant communities are widespread, and the sports meetings are virtually political rallies. Supporters clubs march through the streets, waving their flags and banners, waiting for a new leader to guide them to the promised land. The leader soon appears in an unexpected way.

Suburban psychopathologies are nothing new in Ballard, but an overt and specifically contemporary political element is becoming increasingly prominent in his work. As he said himself a few years ago, he's becoming more left wing as he gets older. To be honest, I didn't think that the political elements of 'Millennium People' worked that well, but it'll still be intriguing to see this new book. I can't think of any other major novelists tackling the current resurgence of petty British nationalism and far-right politics - does it really take a 75-year-old, with real personal experience of the fascism of WWII, to speak up?

How the dead live (and earn)

Odd story in the Wall Street Journal about that old Futurama favourite, cryonic preservation of the post-mortem rich. Now, it seems, the canny corpsicle-to-be is endeavouring to ensure that their after-life is a comfortable one through a little financial engineering:

Like some 1,000 other members of the "cryonics" movement, [Arizona resort operator David Pizer] has made arrangements to have his body frozen in liquid nitrogen as soon as possible after he dies. In this way, Mr. Pizer, a heavy-set, philosophical man who is 64 years old, hopes to be revived sometime in the future when medicine has advanced far beyond where it stands today.
And because Mr. Pizer doesn't wish to return a pauper, he's taken an additional step: He's left his money to himself.
With the help of an estate planner, Mr. Pizer has created legal arrangements for a financial trust that will manage his roughly $10 million in land and stock holdings until he is re-animated. Mr. Pizer says that with his money earning interest while he is frozen, he could wake up in 100 years the "richest man in the world."
Though cryonic suspension of human remains is still dismissed by most medical experts as an outlandish idea, Mr. Pizer is not alone in hoping to hold onto his wealth into the frosty hereafter.
...
At least a dozen wealthy American and foreign businessmen are testing unfamiliar legal territory by creating so-called personal revival trusts designed to allow them to reclaim their riches hundreds, or even thousands, of years into the future.
Such financial arrangements, which tie up money that might otherwise go to heirs or charities, are "more widespread than I originally thought," says A. Christopher Sega, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University and a trusts and estates attorney at Venable LLP, in Washington. Mr. Sega says he's created three revival trusts in the last year.

It still doesn't answer my basic question on cryonics, though. Even if it ever is technologically possible to revive and heal the subjects, what exactly would be the incentive to do so? This new trend would seem to make it even less likely that the corpsicle's descendents or executors would find it in their interest to do so:

In addition to heirs or charities, estate lawyers are also naming their cryonics clients as beneficiaries. If they come back to life after being frozen, the funds revert back to them. Assuming, that is, that there are no legal challenges to the plans.
Thomas Katz, an estate planner at the law firm Ruden McClosky in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., believes cryonics could raise fundamental legal quandaries. Upon coming back to life, for instance, would a person have to repay their life insurance? "Our legal notion of death is pretty fixed. The scientific notion might not be as time goes by," Mr. Katz says.