"I keep trying to think what would have happened had the war not taken place. I would have gone on living here [at Amherst Avenue], and probably would have gone on living in Shanghai. So I see around me here a sort of alternate life that I never actually managed to live because of the war."

Just came across this impressive website called Ballardian, devoted to all things J.G. Ballard.

The top item currently is a long review/reading of a 1991 BBC4 documentary called Shanghai Jim (there's even a link to the whole thing here on youTube and a complete transcript of the programme, here). I remember watching this documentary (quoted above), when it came out I guess, around the time they released The Kindness of Women. The frame for Shanghai Jim - which touches on events from Empire of the Sun - is that Ballard goes back to the city for the first time since just after the war - revisiting the camp in which he and his family were held, the house that they lived in and so on. There's something very interesting about this process of return/revisiting, I think partly because going back to anything, is such an elusive experience, and because it's so very resistant to capture, especially in the visual field. I mean what part of that complex, webbed, uncanny feeling of time-passed and time-collapsing can be captured on film? Very little, although David Lynch might get close to it, at least as on-form as he is Inland Empire. Even on the grainy youTube of Shanghai Jim though there is something extremely compelling about Ballard, in his super-well-spoken/unruffled/well-mannered way, navigating his way through the locations of his own past, sat out-of-place and out-of-time in his white blazer and his hat, top shirt-buttons undone, in the tiny room of Lunghua Camp's G block in which he, his parents and his sister were interned for nearly three years. "This little room..." he says, looking around "..is in fact probably as close as I’ll ever come to home, surprisingly..."

Discussing Tom McCarthy's book Remainder with Hugo, which I wrote about already here. As we're talking we get on to artists and Hugo's describing a conversation he had with Paola Pivi, whose extraordinary staged scenes, often involving displaced animals, or large objects or people, in relation to extreme or unexpected landscapes, he has often worked on with her (some of them are here). Paola's is the donkey in the motorboat stranded motionless on a flat sea, the helicopter overturned and rested on its rotorblades, the pair of zebras stood in the mountainous snow, the alligators turned and swirling in lakes of cream. H. says that sometime ago Paola wondered aloud to him if, aside from the demands of having to make tangible work, she might prefer not to photograph these scenes at all - confirming in the end that she'd rather just stage them as events; to organise the logistics, make things happen and then simply sit back to watch.

I wondered since about the difference between the compulsion to write something into existence and the compulsion to actually make something happen. Perhaps there isn't so much difference as one might think, at least if you believe what Burroughs wrote in The Adding Machine, where he sees writing as kind of magical or political practice that makes things happen in consciousness, in order to see those same things made manifest at some future point; that "the purpose of writing", he says "is to make things happen".

*

Somehow related (I think).

In Berlin at the weekend during the artists talk/discussion at HKDW, William Pope L. said something like this (any error caused by my slow typing):

"I guess I'm interested in making interventions inside people's heads.
Kind of like neuroscience for theatre. That would be good you know - to build a sculpture actually inside peoples consciousness... and then do shit in there."

(Works best if you can imagine the ironic (?) mad-scientist glee with which William laughed after saying this).  

From Devon M. wrote this:

All ok here apart from a couple of hours in a and e on Friday. A chain of
events, pick, concrete, eye, concrete. Bleeding eye. Nice. N was only asking
for a story with bleeding eyes the other day (true) so I came home and he
got a live one. All ok but v sore and I look like a terminator abt to be
mashed, or mid mashed. Light is a problem at the moment.

 Meanwhile, in post Apocalypse Liverpool:

I'm a Nogadog, me. I've been one for four years and I'm 17 now. I thought it was a good thing when I was young. It was all my mates. You are just a Nogzy soldier. We are all Nogzy soldiers.

More here. 

More info on Vlatka's work here.