Haven't read "MP" yet, but it sounds like "more of the same".
"High Rise" is the last Ballard I read and I found it a bit unsatisfactory and predictable
(again would make a great film), just as I did "Cocaine Nights"
(I just found it so weird that Charles does not help his jailed brother?
And It's almost the same book as "Super-Cannes").
"Crash" is fantastic though (I like the movie: why was it so controversial
over here? The use of colour by Cronenberg - the rescue machinery, the cars).
Have just started with Ballard's short stories - that will take ages ...
I don't think Ballard is a bad writer though, some sequences read like poetry,
it's a bit distanced (but then he gets he's info/inspiration from the papers, TV (and probably the net?)
these days), it's a bit glossy (no wonder he liked Helmut Newton's photography).
I still like it though. Sure - he's no Dostoyevsky or Hamsun
(I trust it was Hamsun's "The Hunger" which
was mentioned? Tangent - the excellent 16 min epic 12" B-side "The Hunger" by Winston Tong.
Which you now can get on CD as well:
http://www.ltmpub.freeserve.co.uk/wtcat.html.
Bought the 12" when it came out, never got Tong's album -
but for a tenner I might get this CD as well, heck it's almost what I paid for one
_track_ last weekend (white label grime is expensive).
---
Here is an old interview with our man from Suburbia I found while doing
some other thing (probably searching for horrible JD covers).
On the real Atrocity Exhibition and more, interview is from 1971:
http://www.studio-international.co.uk/archive/Paolozzi-1971-182.htm
Just over a year ago I put on an exhibition of crashed cars, what I called new sculpture, at the New Arts Lab.
And I had three cars brought to the gallery. It was very easy to mount the show because the technology of moving cars around is highly developed. A crashed Mini, an A40 and a Pontiac which had been in a massive front-end collision, a Pontiac from that last grand period of American automobile styling, around the mid 50s. Huge flared tail-fins and a maximum of iconographic display.
And I had an opening party at the gallery I'd never seen 100 people get drunk so quickly. Now this has something to do with the cars on display. I also had a topless girl interviewing people on closed-circuit TV so that people could see themselves being interviewed around the crashed cars by this topless girl. This was clearly too much. I was the only sober person there.