a dedication written on the inside of the front cover of my copy of crash by jg ballard

[TRANSCRIPT: Susan - I'm going to miss working along side you. Let's keep in touch. I hope you enjoy this book. You always like the weird shit! - Issac]

p.s., dennis cooper / crash, j.g. ballard

"I do everything she says because I want her"

“For Vaughan, events have no meaning and do not even seem to be phenomenologically present until they are captured and mediated by some means of mechanical reproduction. The image is at the hands of the text's characters thus the subject of both fetishisation and exorbitation: nothing is more real than the image, and without the image there is no longer any real.”

Andrzej Gasiorek on J.G. Ballard and Crash.

you know what? fuck you. *untwinkifies your James Ballard*

I posted a drawing a while back of the way I imagine these two in the book, but I have since sold my soul to the devil in exchange for better art skills so I present to you a better version

left is Vaughan, right is James

I made these two in tomodachi life as well for the sake of making them get together but James ended up looking like the fucking mayor (?) from miraculous lady bug and I can’t look him in the eyes anymore

overcoming social disinitiative not because I wish to fix myself but so I can find someone to be the Ballard to my Vaughan

goncharov (1973) is a movie zach made up to make york mad with how committed he is to the bit

Barbara Murray attempts a needlessly convoluted swindle, as Lady Diane Battersley in The Adventurer: The Not-So-Merry Widow (1.18, ITC, 1973)

sometimes I get doubtful of my anarchistic faith in humanity's ability to organize and live fully liberated from hierarchy and authority.... but then thousands of fucking weirdos will get together to spontaneously manifest a goddamn mafia film with consistent themes of alienation and yearning and powerlessness, complete with art and discourse and analysis that creates the film itself through the act of dissecting and meditating on it.

like Katya said in that scene on the balcony as she and Sofia share a single lonely cigarette together, "I don't know if I feel more hopeful but I suppose I'm at least feeling something."

Suzi Quatro “48 Crash” (1973)

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Memes

At a certain point, it was just hard to keep up. They seemed to fall from the sky like fizzing raindrops, soaking everything in pure wildness—memes, that is. 2022 had an absolute bumper crop of memes. The fertile field of this year’s chaos was sown freely, resulting in some impressively widespread phenomena. Most of it remained pretty contained within the dashboard, but at the end of the year the biggest meme of them all broke containment…We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. 

Cast your mind back to January 2022. We kicked off the year with Horse Plinko, which soon joined forces with Eeby Deeby in a frenzy of flaming gifs in which the poor horse plinko’d its way to Super Hell. Nothing has ever summed up the mildly deranged meme generation process on Tumblr so perfectly. 

This era of memes merged smoothly with the Month of Blorbo. Can you believe blorbo from my shows is more or less purely a 2022 phenomenon? Granted, the original post happened in late 2021, but it was the new year by the time “blorbo” secured itself in our vocabulary. How did we even live our lives on Tumblr without the word “blorbo”? It’s impossible to even imagine at this point. 

Springtime dawned with the rise of Live Slug Reaction, which dominated the dashboard as everyone rushed to plop that shocked slug in the corner of their favorite gay moments from TV and film. And in May came a very important event that would define the rest of the year on Tumblr: the launch of Dracula Daily, Affectionately dubbed “tumblr book club,” the serialized email newsletter found a hugely involved following on Tumblr and spawned an infinite variety of memes, beginning with the iconic paprika recipes. 

The Summer of Morbius dominated Tumblr from June onwards, with everyone going bonkers with Morb-based puns, jokes about the film’s most ridiculous moments, and reblogging a single GIF somehow containing the entire movie that would crash your browser when it played on your dash..

The i love you x i love you y text post meme saw us to the end of the summer, and autumn came with the rise of the GOUGER. Or is it GOUGAR? Regardless, the strange but harmless creature took over everyone’s meme palette for a while, getting involved in increasingly silly scenarios. 

This free-for-all was interrupted by the death of Queen Elizabeth, an event that was solemn everywhere else. . But on Tumblr, of course, users swamped the dashboard with Queen Liz-related memes and commentary. And crabs. There were quite a lot of those.

Later, in September, the Try Guys saga unfolding on Twitter and YouTube filtered over to Tumblr in the form of the “lost focus and had a consensual workplace relationship” meme, with Tumblr users casting various favorite co-worker ships in the roles of the controversial real-life pairing. 

And finally, closing out the year, the meme you’ve all been waiting for: the one and only Goncharov (1973). Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, Goncharov is a movie borne out of the magic combination of a misprinted shoe label and Tumblr’s fertile imagination. Thanks to a fake movie poster by user @beelzeebub, which gave names and faces to the characters, Tumblr ran absolutely wild, churning out analysis, fanart, and even fanfiction at an astounding rate. This was by far the meme to win 2022: it gained coverage all over the internet, including the freaking New York Times, and even Scorsese himself acknowledged it. You did that, Tumblr. Goncharov forever, all hail the power of the Tumblr meme!

“Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings - these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect.”

J.G. Ballard, Crash: Introduction (1995).

why is latin the language you summon demons with???

Oh fun question!

Basically, it's not. Damn near every culture on earth has their own Malevolent Spirits who are invoked in any number of ways. For most of western occult history, there were basically two big magic languages: Classical Greek, and Hebrew.

The current media tropes about summoning demons goes all the way back to Sumer, but it bottlenecks in the Jewish Tanakh. The whole "elaborate ingredients and rituals you gotta do to summon the demon" thing is pre-semitic, but the that demons can be bound with holy symbols like the name of god is hella Jewish, and the idea that one can drive off demons with nothing but overwhelming faith in God is hella Christian. Current attitudes towards Demons are a big old blender of all of these things.

But, the reason Church Latin is so common, is because it's the Official Language of the Catholic Church.

You gotta understand that back in the 1960s, very few people knew what an exorcism was. Things like summoning demons and exorcisms we're the sort of thing you barely heard about, the realm of abandoned ancient traditions and rumored fringe practices like snake handling and speaking in tongues.

But then, I shit you not, in 1973 the Exorcist movie came out, and Catholic priests kinda became superheroes. Father Karras reciting Latin Scripture to do battle with a demon is evocative, and frankly pretty badass. It helped that The Exorcist was an amazing movie.

That date is important. 1973 was at the tail end of a big Hollywood crash. All these big studios had to back off for a bit, which led to the boom in the B-Studio system; make it cheap, sell it wide.

The Exorcist hit this cultural bullseye; it was a really good movie made when people were about to make a thousand shitty knockoffs of everything. Also the Moral Majority was barely a year away.

Just watched crash (again, i know, shocker) and I had the epiphany that the movie essentially starts and ends with Catherine. She’s the first character on screen, having a fling with that guy in the hangar, and later confides to James that it didn’t really do it for her. Every single character in the movie has been in a crash before or during the duration of the film, and she’s the last one to be involved, kind of bringing her into the whole new sexuality thing right at the very end and putting her on par with the others. And while james has his enlightenment at the start of the movie, with Catherine slowly building toward it, it comes across as a smoother transition, like a willingness to participate and an exploration and curiosity, rather than james having no choice.

In the book however it starts and ends with Vaughan, and he’s the focus as the vehicle (lmao) of james’s exploration. Even though the book’s in first person james will not shut up about him for two seconds.

So the way each different thing is bookended by james plus a different character kind of changes the vibe a bit???

That reads completely incoherently and idk what i’m on about but ANYWAY next time I watch crash I’ m going to pretend Catherine is the main character and see what changes