“The American dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now…”
—J.G. Ballard, 1983
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Sterling Morrison, quoted in Rob Sheffield's Beatles book I'm guessing the VU hated the Mothers ever since that period when the latt... -
Someone recentl y asked Greil Marcus why "sixties and seventies rock crits hate prog so much?" "Why do people hate prog roc...
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The pinnacle of that view of freedom, of course, is avant-garde jazz, which I find by and large a dead loss. It operates on the assumption...
But what if the American images and fantasies that resonate are the nightmares? Seems a bit early for Ballard to be this pessimistic. Did he foresee Asian pop culture picking up the slack?
ReplyDeleteEarly? Ballard's Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan came out in 1968, and it's very hard to see it as a optimistic tale.
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