Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Samuel L. Jackson is back in the game, soon to work with the best material he’ll ever clap eyes on.

UPDATED. Aside from the films of Empire and Crash, Ballard has had almost all his novels optioned for the screen at some stage. Suitors include Richard Gere, Samuel L. Jackson, Jack Nicholson, David Frost and a trio of scantily-clad cavegirls.

Is Woody Allen a Ballard fan? Lucy Vickery at The Spectator certainly is.

Out in the suburbs, the Birmingham-based Ballard exhibition Zodiac 3000 draws first blood…

In 2007 I toured Shepperton using Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company as my guidebook. Here are the results of that neurological survey, born from the torsion of “every cell in my body waiting at the end of a miniature runway”.

CrashTest magazine presents Atroxhity: “15 Visual Poets’ tribute to Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition“.

For this upcoming exhibition, the International Project Space in Birmingham will be transformed into the J.G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research, “an institute built to interrogate the New Psychology explored in Ballard’s fiction.”

It’s official: Ballard is the 28th most erotic writer in London.

Miracles of Life is in the running for the £30,000 Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize.

Details of a new exhibition in London that “often plays with the constants of space and time”. It includes the work of Michelle Lord, whose “Future Ruins” series previously featured on Ballardian.

Here’s a tribute to Gabrielle Drake, a co-conspirator of Ballard’s and the undisputed Queen of both outer and inner space. All hail 1971, the Year of the Drake.

A man is trapped in an elevator for 41 hours, steadily losing his mind. But to you, he’s just another bug crawling around on a security-camera lens. What do you do?

Good old postmodernism. Here’s another claim about manga being influenced by an obscure Ballard story.

Squirrel Boy meets Concrete Island, and the kids are alright.

Banksy’s latest masterpiece.

Information on a forthcoming exhibition at The University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities, inspired by Ballard and The Atrocity Exhibition.

“What kind of animals are being exhibited?” Ballard’s “The Recognition” is currently featuring on BBC Radio 7.

Reviewing Miracles, the Age newspaper drops a clanger. Still, I wouldn’t mind visiting ‘Shaghai’ one day…

To celebrate the new version of the wonderful SurveillanceSaver software, here is The Ballardian Primer to Surveillance Cameras, with all quotes taken from Ballard and all images lifted from the Axis CCTV network.

MelbPsy gets all Atrocity Exhibition on the House that Sam Newman built, the ‘tabloid architecture’ sheathing yet another backyard Aussie micronation.

In 1991 Simon Brook made a short film from J.G. Ballard’s obscure 1963 short story, ‘Minus One’. Enjoy this super-rare screening of Simon’s film.

I’ve been asked to contribute to a documentary on car parks. Here then, as preparation, is my Ballardian Primer to Car Parks, with quotes from Ballard’s novels.

Here are the entries in the 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. Congratulations to the winner, Ben Slater.

Here’s a dossier on presidential candidate Ralph Nader, courtesy of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Entries have closed for the Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. More soon…

The final version of Thomas Cazals’ tribute, ‘J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton’, has been released. It’s one of the stranger JGB ‘adaptations’ around, and is told with considerable flair and skill.

A repost of this tribute to Robbe-Grillet, with the addition of some extra quotes that either illuminate or obfuscate…

Iain Sinclair and Will Self on the same stage talking about psychogeography and Ballard? Who knew.

Reminder: six days left to submit your entry for the Ballardian Home Movie Competition. Here is some extra background…

Miracles is BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

infinite thØught takes a Ballard-inspired tour of Bluewater, one of the inspirations for JGB’s Kingdom Come.

Vintage Ballard photos now online from RE/Search Publications.

Was Ballard influenced by Ian Fleming at the onset of his career? Or was there a sparkle of satirical intent in the author’s eye?

Could it really be possible that a Japanese manga artist was influenced by J.G. Ballard’s most obscure novel?

A few notes on Steve Severin, the Banshees, and Ballard…

I caved in and implemented two site-specific scenarios that I possibly thought I wouldn’t do in any especially near version of the future…

This post is given over to recent links readers have sent me. ‘Ballardian’ or not? You decide.

From amazon.co.uk:
Synopsis
‘Miracles of Life’ opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. In the intervening chapters Ballard creates a memoir that is both an enthralling narrative and a detailed examination of […]

Recent media action surrounding Miracles of Life.

The Guardian’s Danny Leigh gets behind our Ballardian Home Movie competition.

From BBC Radio 3: ‘Philip Dodd meets two of the most important voices in contemporary British writing: Martin Amis and JG Ballard, who are both publishing new works of non-fiction.’

The Times has two more extracts from Miracles of Life. In the first, Ballard reminisces about his time as a trainee air force pilot. In the second, he discusses the ideas behind Crash.

Photo from Waterstones Book Quarterly; photographer Gautier Deblonde.
British readers should note that the Waterstones Book Quarterly has published the full print version of Hari Kunzru’s filmed interview with JGB. Still no major revelations, but yet another great quote from Ballard:
We’re all shaped by our childhoods, but particularly so if one’s childhood takes place during war […]

Phil Smith of the wonderful Wrights & Sites collective has sent me information on forthcoming ‘walk-orientated performances, events and objects’. While not explicitly linked to Ballard, various themes and preoccupations will be familiar to readers of this site:
First of all the show I have written based on my Easter 2007 walk following the route of […]

Announcing The 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies, a competition for 1-minute films shot on mobile phones. This is to promote JGB’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life, and the prize is a copy of Miracles plus 5 Ballard back titles. Presented by ballardian.com and HarperCollins.

I am delighted to report that the book of Chris Marker’s La Jetée is back in print through Zone Books — and in hardcover, too. It will be out in (US) Spring 2008. Thank you, thank you: for years, second-hand copies were changing hands via Amazon and eBay for anything up to $400.
Unable to […]

Still from Hari Kunzru’s interview with J.G. Ballard. © Waterstone’s Books Quarterly.
Waterstones is featuring a video interview with JGB, conducted by Hari Kunzru to promote Miracles of Life. There are no surprises here. Kunzru asks Ballard about the relationship of Miracles to JGB’s semi-autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, and […]

I had to smile when I read this from Wired’s Clive Thompson [via Boing Boing]:
If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas. From where I sit, traditional […]

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG fame is giving a lecture tonight at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, home of the innovative built-environment module, Unit 15, led by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy. I’m sure Ballard will pop up somewhere in Geoff’s talk. Not only have I previously interviewed Geoff about the intersections between JGB […]