A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status — all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).
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Interview in Penthouse (September 1970)J. G. Ballard
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I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.
We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.J. G. Ballard
Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful.
J. G. Ballard
The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy ... I don't dare continue.
Leonard Bernstein
Planes will crash, He'll never let you down.
So maybe there's a crash coming for the ground,
Seek His face, He'll never let you down.
Worship grace, He'll never let you down.Sufjan Stevens
We have to beef up our searches, which are now pretty dismal, so we can find out about these things before we get hit. ... It takes a dramatic event to get people's attention, and we thought the comet crash with Jupiter might have done the job. ... we tend to ignore an extraterrestrial hazard that could reduce the planet to rubble. ... What we really need is a good scare.
Brian G. Marsden
Ballard, J. G.
Ballmer, Steve
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