Archive for the ‘archival’ Category
By
Dan OHara •
Mar 11th, 2009 •
Category:
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ambit magazine, America, France, Japan, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shanghai, WWII, William Burroughs, archival, autobiography, death of affect, drained swimming pools, film, inner space, memory, science fiction, sexual politics, surrealism, technology, television
Dan O’Hara back-translates an interview with JGB originally published in French in 1985. As the interviewers observe, Ballard was almost the subject of a French cult due to Crash. Asking why there are no car-crashes in Empire of the Sun, they reveal a very suggestive lacuna, with Ballard replying that even when one characteristic theme is absent from a work, the underlying emotion may remain the same, expressed by different means. Choice of metaphor is merely a matter of tone
By
Dan OHara •
Nov 21st, 2008 •
Category:
France, Lead Story, architecture, archival, crime, technology, urban decay
Dan O’Hara back-translates a brief interview with J.G. Ballard, originally published in French in 1975. Here, Ballard discusses the research he did into the link between criminal behaviour and urban environments, a seed of insight that would sustain his writing right up until Kingdom Come.
By
Ballardian •
Aug 15th, 2008 •
Category:
Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, archival, consumerism, photography, psychopathology, sexual politics, speed & violence, surrealism, terrorism, the middle classes, visual art
Here’s another republished interview, this time from 2005 as Mitchell and Ford probe JGB about his infamous 1970 ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition, which elicited drunken aggression from its bemused audience.
By
Ballardian •
Aug 12th, 2008 •
Category:
America, Lead Story, Pacific, WWII, alternate worlds, archival, boredom, conspiracy theory, film, music, politics, postmodernism, psychopathology, television, war
With thanks to Headpress books, here’s an interview with JGB conducted by Mark Goodall in 2006 for his book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens. The interview covers JGB’s admiration for the Mondo Cane films of Gualtiero Jacopetti, so-called ’shockumentaries’ that in their artfully faked scenarios present what Ballard terms ‘an elective psychopathy that would change the world (so we hoped, naively)’.
By
Dan OHara •
Jun 24th, 2008 •
Category:
America, Germany, archival, boredom, enviro-disaster, inner space, politics, psychopathology, religion, science fiction, speed & violence, the middle classes, war
This is the latest in Dan O’Hara’s back translations of German Ballard chats: an interview with JGB from 2005. This may well be the only time Ballard has been asked to consider the lyrics of Kanye West.
By
Dan OHara •
May 17th, 2008 •
Category:
America, Bruce Sterling, Germany, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, WWII, William Gibson, archival, consumerism, politics, psychology, science fiction, short stories, surrealism
Dan O’Hara is back with another translation of a German Ballard interview, this time from 2007 with JGB in priapic, puckish form.
By
Dan OHara •
May 4th, 2008 •
Category:
Germany, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, archival, drugs, media landscape, politics, punk, science fiction, sexual politics, space relics, speed & violence, surrealism, technology, urban revolt
Another installment in Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of archival German Ballard interviews: a 1982 conversation conducted by Werner Fuchs and Joachim Körber.
By
Dan OHara •
Mar 23rd, 2008 •
Category:
Freud, Germany, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shanghai, William Burroughs, archival, dystopia, film, psychology, science fiction, sexual politics, short stories, surrealism, utopia
This is the second of Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of JGB interviews originally published in German. This one dates from 1976, and in it Ballard provides comment on Russian writers and explains how film technique infiltrates and influences his own writing.
By
Dan OHara •
Mar 15th, 2008 •
Category:
Germany, WWII, archival, biology, deep time, entropy, enviro-disaster, inner space, science fiction, surrealism
Dan O’Hara has re-translated three interviews with JGB, originally published in German in the 60s, in which Ballard provides absorbing insight into his enviro-disaster trilogy: The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World.
By
Mike Bonsall •
Feb 21st, 2008 •
Category:
Shanghai, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, WWII, archival, autobiography, consumerism
Here’s the last in our batch of transcripts of recent Miracles promotions: James Naughtie’s interview with JGB for BBC Radio 4.
By
Mike Bonsall •
Feb 17th, 2008 •
Category:
Iain Sinclair, Salvador Dali, Shanghai, Shepperton, WWII, archival, autobiography, speed & violence, surrealism, visual art
Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.
By
Mike Bonsall •
Feb 14th, 2008 •
Category:
Shanghai, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, WWII, archival, autobiography, celebrity culture
This one’s a transcript of BBC 2’s Newsnight Review segment on Miracles of Life. It features Tony Parsons, Julie Myerson and John Harris and is presented by Kirsty Wark.
By
Ballardian •
Feb 7th, 2008 •
Category:
Shanghai, Shepperton, WWII, alternate worlds, archival, autobiography, consumerism
Here’s a transcript of Philip Dodd’s recent BBC Radio 3 interview with JGB.
By
Ballardian •
Feb 2nd, 2008 •
Category:
Shanghai, Shepperton, WWII, Will Self, William Burroughs, archival, dystopia, science fiction, urban decay
Will Self was recently interviewed on BBC Radio 4 by Mariella Frostrup about his admiration for J.G. Ballard’s work. Here’s a transcript of that interview.
By
Alexander Gutzmer •
Dec 7th, 2007 •
Category:
Germany, architecture, archival, consumerism, politics, terrorism
This is an English translation of an interview with J.G. Ballard by Alexander Gutzmer, originally published in German by Welt am Sonntag, 3 June 2007.
By
Damien Love •
Oct 12th, 2007 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, archival, crime, gated communities, travel
Damien Love interviewed J.G. Ballard in September 1996. At the time Ballard was one of only a very few people in the UK to have seen David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash, which was wrapped in a controversy that was baffling then and seems truly mystifying now.
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 7th, 2005 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Shanghai, archival, censorship, consumerism, dystopia, film, gated communities, psychology, psychopathology, science fiction, sexual politics, television
Photo by Simon Sellars
This transcript was first published in Sub Dee Magazine (no. 5 Summer 1997), a print project I was involved in long before Ballardian. At the time, J.G. Ballard’s career was in the ascendancy after what was perceived to be an average period in his writing. Cocaine Nights had just been released and [...]
By
Ballardian •
Jul 9th, 2005 •
Category:
William Burroughs, archival, celebrity culture, psychopathology, sexual politics, speed & violence, suicide, visual art
by William Burroughs (1970)
The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content [...]