ABSTRACT
On the other side of the line Iain Chambers offers the socio-historical perspective on lived experience. The specific, and ultimately psychotic, trends that Ballard addresses in Running Wild are played out across the life and times of Chambers’s metropolitan experience. Chambers is particularly dramatic in his opening to a section entitled ‘Buildings and Food’ (an allusion to Talking Heads’ second album). ‘The city was considered to be a conspiracy against real needs,’ he says, ‘it was lived as a drama, a crisis, not as an opportunity’.
