Annotations - Dead Souls

Wherein we pick up with Mark a couple of years before his first appearance and we find out why his mum abandoned him to the Ghost Town. It's a Thursday night in 1981 or thereabouts, a couple of years before Ghost Town, and Mark is doing everything he can to be grown up and responsible. I like the way that this piece dovetails with Mark's later (chronological) appearance. In both pieces, you get the impression that Mark is struggling to become something more than he is. Here he's tring to be one of the older, cooler kids, to meet his mum's expectations, to be more than his father, to keep his sister safe and to figure out what to do with all these strange new urges. There's no way he's going to manage all of that, and this story exists at the moment when it all falls down. If there's a central tragedy to DW then it's this: Mark only ever wanted to be good.
I also like that it's almost a direct parallel of The Word Is - Two stories about semi - abandoned children who retreat into music at every opportunity,drift into dreams about nuclear wastelands and silver stars, then wake to find that something has been taken from them. Again, there are certain recurring plot threads and symbols throughout the whole of DW.
Other than those thoughts, there isn't a lot to say about this one. The title is a track by Joy Division, later covered by Nine Inch Nails for the soundtrack to The Crow, a goth superhero movie. Here it refers to the whole Wilson family, living out their squalid little lives as if they were already dead, the ghosts in Mark's dream, the M.A.D. global wipeout and of course, Messrs Peel and Curtis who appear in the first paragraphs. This is Peel's first published appearance in DW, although he also crops up in an unfinished Sarah piece set in the heyday of pirate radio boats.
Chronologically, we're all over the place with this one. Curtis died in 1980 but Bucks Fizz didn't get to number one until April the following year. The only Joy Division track likely to get a play on Top Of The Pops is Love Will Tear Us Apart, which was released posthumously, although Peel appears to introduce the band live in the studio. Oh, and Peel didn't start presenting Top Of The Pops until 1981 and probably never introduced a band by predicting the aquatic demise of the human race. But I like to think that if Curtis had lived, if Joy Division had appeared on the same episode of Top Of The Pops as Bucks Fizz and that if John Peel had introduced Dead Souls to a shellshocked nation, those are precisely the terms he would have used.
In a similar vein, bonkon and spaz are hardly the most PC of terms these days, but both were in common playground parlance back then. You may not agree with their usage here, but it's true to the character and the time.
The man with the guitar by his knees is Peter Hook. And he does look cool. There will be no argument with this.
Going Underground by The Jam fits nicely with the ideas of reinvention and a counter culture that run through a lot of DW, while the Visage song is probably going to be Fade To Grey, both because of the scenes which follow in Mark's dream and because it's the only song of there's that anyone remembers...

Annotations for In A Lonely Place

I’m not sure about the exact date on this piece. I think it must have been written sometime in 2003.

The title references Joy Division’s In A Lonely Place, one of the last tracks written by Ian Curtis before he committed suicide in 1980. New Order re-recorded the track and placed it as a B side for the single release of Ceremony (another Joy Division track re-recorded by New Order).

I have some sort of fixation with telegraph wires, electricity pylons, communication masts, satellite dishes and aerials (please note our DB profile image). I’m still trying to put my finger on why I suffer this affliction; I’m not sure if I really want to know – but the problem still persists. Hence, the telegraph wire in In A Lonely Place. The hanging corpses are, yet again, in reference to Ian Curtis’ suicide.

I’ve had an unhealthy interest in military history, in particular World War II, since my Dad introduced me to old war movies like; In Which We Serve, The Wooden Horse, The Dam Busters, The Colditz Story, The Battle of the River Plate, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Enemy Below, The Longest Day, The Hill and Where Eagles Dare. I then faithfully followed, on a weekly basis, heroic adventuring in Victor and Commando comics and more recently in Garth Ennis’ War Stories, Enemy Ace and First Flight of the Phantom Eagle. Thus, Stalingrad fell into my personal research remit back in 2003. I had been reading Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and I thought this, particular campaign, would fit nicely within the world of Doubtless Wonder.

The MP35 or Machine Pistole 35 was the main SMG (sub machine gun) of the Waffen SS and some Wermacht units.

Having read IALP again, there is a lot hidden within the piece that I can’t annotate at this time. I don’t want to give too much away.

Cheers

Phil


(Originally Published 07/05/09)

This Is The Way, Step Inside. This Is The Way, Step Inside.

Today we lost JG Ballard.

Beyond the obvious debt we owe - and lets face it, he pretty much perfected the patchwork novel with The Atrocity Exhibition and Vermillion Sands, without either of which it's doubtful that Doubtless Wonder would ever have took the turns it has - he gave us so much more.

As a wee slip of a lad reading old New Worlds paperbacks, I found this strange brand of SF which seemed to really speak to me. None of the red-hating rocket-shippery of the yanks' sci-fi, this was English through and through; Cold, clear and brutal as ice. What few happy endings there were came as a real surprise, and you felt almost cheated when someone made it past the final paragraph in one piece. Moorcock and Aldiss created worlds and characters that will stay with me forever, but in The Drowned World, Ballard gave me the most beautiful vision of the apocalypse I've ever encountered. Even now, with every newspaper mention of melting ice caps and rising sea levels, my inner 12-year-old flashes back to The Drowned World and remembers that actually, that sounds pretty damn cool...

The apocalypse, Ballard style, is an extremely attractive proposition, like a bizarre collision between Heart Of Darness and The Kraken Wakes. The Crystal World adds in crystallization and leprosy, while the smaller-scale endings of Empire Of The Sun and Crash (World War II and fatal car crashes, respectively) are if anything even more exciting, liberating and arousing. Possibly too arousing, but what the hell... The man gave us President Charles Manson for christ's sake! Even if it wasn't the real Manson and we had to go through complete economic meltdown and ecological disaster to get there (I'm pretty sure it was fiction...), it would be worth it to see that.

On top of all that (and Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Concrete Island and the rest), Ballard lent titles to Joy Division, Klaxons, Hawkwind and, erm, Buggles. He inspired Video Killed The Radio Star.

Video. Killed. The. Radio. Star.

Oh yes.

And finally, in a one-two Ballard/Cronenberg titanic tag team match, he sent your favourite authors all the way to Wigan. There was no other option as there were no other cinemas willing to show the film adaptation of Crash. We've got Liverpool at one end of the road, Manchester at the other, and we had to go all the way to Wigan to see James Spader dry humping a leg wound. Last time I saw the film, it was on Channel 4, not long after the watershed and not one newspaper took the time to denounce it on the front page. Oh brave new world...

So anyway, today we lost JG Ballard. The apocalypse is a step closer, but it won't be half as attractive without him there.

Karl