Ballardian

by Tim Chapman

Iain Sinclair at the Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman, © 2006.
Iain Sinclair has been acclaimed as one of Britain’s most visionary writers and as an incomparable prose stylist. His early writing, notably Lud Heat (1975) and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), was rooted in his adopted home of East London. It did much to [...]

From the Guardian, Saturday March 4, 2006.
“Look back at Empire
JG Ballard waited 40 years before writing about his experiences in a Japanese internment camp. Here he remembers how Hollywood hijacked his childhood memories to create a deeply moving film.
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades [...]

UPDATE: Read our interview with JGB, in which he discusses Kingdom Come and more.
A new, fuller synopsis of JGB’s new novel, taken from Amazon.
“Kingdom Come — J.G. Ballard
Synopsis
This is a new masterpiece of fiction from J. G. Ballard which asks, could Consumerism turn into Fascism? Richard Pearson, a 42-year-old advertising executive is driving from [...]

An excerpt from Peter Carty’s Ballard-referencing review of an interesting-sounding novel…
“An Everyman’s life history doomed to repeat itself as farce”
Remainder, By Tom McCarthy
Published: 12 December 2005
“Re-enactment has been a feature in recent art, most famously in Jeremy Deller’s reprise of the Orgreave battle between striking miners and police. It is a art practice that readily [...]

Another evocative feature, by Steve Rose in the Guardian, on architectural experimentation in Dubai -
“There is apparently no distinction between resort architecture and permanent housing. Nor is there much of a genuine urban realm outside the old city centre. Instead, there are discrete, self-contained developments, separated from each other by 10-lane highways or empty [...]

Photos from a recent sojourn (en route to Singapore and Bali) at Ballard’s favourite location, the Heathrow Hilton. “The Heathrow Hilton, designed by Michael Manser, is a masterpiece. It is my favourite building in London, and keeps alive the spirit of the 20th century’s greatest architect, Le Corbusier. Beautifully proportioned, it resembles a cross between [...]

From the Guardian, Friday September 23, 2005
“David Cronenberg’s films are full of images that make us recoil in horror. But what we are really trying to hide from is the whole messy business of being alive. By JG Ballard”
“Are we all, without realising it, taking part in a vast witness protection programme? Did we observe, [...]

Another interview with Cronenberg puffing ‘A History of Violence’, with a different take on ‘Crash’ -
Q: When Crash came out, a lot of people took it literally and thought it was stupid — how can you get turned on by a car crash? — instead of thinking of it as a metaphor. I mean, it [...]

Good interview with David Cronenberg in Canada’s Toro Magazine, including a brief exchange on Crash -
What happens when you get an actor who says no to a piece of direction?
I’ve never had that.
There was a problem, wasn’t there, with Elias Koteas doing a gay scene in Crash?
Yeah. But he did it.
What happened there?
I don’t yell [...]

A JGB-quoting story from the Daily Telegraph, on the ‘news’ that popular glamour model Jordan is to ‘write’ two novels -
Several heavyweights of the literary world were impressed to have an unexpected new novelist in their midst.
JG Ballard, the veteran author of more than 30 books including Empire of the Sun, said: “I hope she [...]

A loon writes…

Lonely hearts among the business parks of the M4

Ballard-referencing article on the gentrification/renaissance of high rises.