On holiday with J.G. Ballard

Festive season now kicked in - Callum at home til 9th January. Abnormal service will be resumed next year. In the meantime found a book

The Angle Between Two Walls The Fiction ofJ.G. Ballard: Roger Luckhurst:Liverpool University: 1997.

This has provoked a fresh line of approach to previous enquiries into the location of the counterculture in 21st century. Also found editorial in New Scientist 17 December 2005 which is somewhat gloomy. Apparently even President Bush's climate change advisor reckons we only have ten years to act before change is irreversible. Time to re-read The Drowned World?

Luckhurst's book pretty comprehensive on literary/ art movements front , avant-garde v postmodernism etc but no interface with music. E.g. Joy Division's Atrocity Exhibition or Cabaret Voltaire and industrial musics which create soundscapes equivalent to Ballard's wordscapes. [Read book whilst listening to Cabs, cd of music 78-82 - replacement for missing/ scratched vinyl]

Also the overlap between development of chaosmagic and postmodernism through eighties into early nineties. With revival of Cold War 78/85 as historic background. [From a history of The Bomb ]

All a pretty dense / intense conjunction of signification.

Happy Solstice : MerryChristmas: and looking forward to 2006 as 30th anniversary of 'punk'.