If You Can't Be Kobe, Be Super-Cannes

On This Day In History
1992: Mike Tyson convicted of rape

Quote Of The Day
"I want to rip out his heart and feed it to Lennox Lewis. I want to kill people. I want to rip their stomachs out and eat their children."
(Mike Tyson)

Charming.

I've never read a J.G. Ballard novel I haven't thoroughly enjoyed, and the same is true, so far, of Super-Cannes. I'm about half way through and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Gary Numan has often quoted from J.G. Ballard novels in his lyrics and explored Ballardian themes in his songs. I wonder if Ballard has possibly returned the favour in Super-Cannes? The protagonist of the novel is a pilot who flew a Harvard which, Ballard points out, is a plane that is often used to double for Mitsubishi Zeroes. When Gary Numan was an air display pilot, he flew a Harvard that was painted as a Mitsubishi Zero. 

Super-Cannes is a novel which takes place largely in a hi-tech, somewhat sterile business park. Underneath it's white, pristine, neo-puritan facade, many of the residents indulge in a variety of seedy vices. Is it that dichotomy which caused one of its former residents, a paediatrician who also helped at a charity for wayward teenage girls run by nuns, to run amok with a rifle and kill ten of his fellow residents before turning the gun on himself? Is it a coincidence that the imagery on Gary Numan's The Fury is also clean, white and sterile while many of the songs on the album deal with various forms of vice and violence? I wonder.

Creatures