Ballardian

This is a review of John Foxx’s Melbourne performance of Tiny Colour Movies, his found-film collection and live soundtrack. For the reviewer, witnessing this may have solved a two-year-old puzzle; certainly, it brought everything full circle back to Ballard.

I reread Iain Sinclair’s BFI book on Cronenberg’s Crash recently as research for my article on the Crash! short film. I have to say I am amazed the BFI ever agreed to publishing it in a series about ‘modern film classics’. Cronenberg and the film take back stage to Sinclair’s virtuoso reconstruction of Ballard’s [...]

ABOVE: Crash! on YouTube

by Simon Sellars

CRASH! (1971)
Director: Harley Cokliss
Writer: J.G. Ballard
Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake
I wasn’t satisfied by just writing SF stories, you see. My imagination was eager to expand in all directions.”
J.G. Ballard. ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, 1982.
Leached away by the camera lens, the dimension of depth is missing from the room, and [...]

More on the Dead Di meme, as Chris Petit reviews 12:23 by Eoin McNamee and The Accident Man by Tom Cain:
The princess, as a largely self-invented figure, is a gift to fiction, not least because the reasons she might have been killed are finally less arresting than speculation on her untimely death: the swansong of [...]

+ CATALOGUE OF CONTEMPORARY ATROCITIES

Jeannette Baxter, organiser of this weekend’s J.G. Ballard Conference at the University of East Anglia, delivers a challenging examination of Surrealist influences in Ballard’s Running Wild for Issue 5 of the online journal, Papers of Surrealism.
‘The Surrealist Fait-Divers: Uncovering Violent Histories in J. G. Ballard’s Running Wild’: Abstract
In this paper [...]

Still from ‘Shepperton’s Oracle’, dir. Thomas Cazals, 2007.
Ballardiana, Part 1
Via Podcast Pickle, I found a rendition of ‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’, Kevin Patrick Mahoney’s ‘iconoclastic homage to the great author’:
Oh Jim,
We can’t get enough of him
In Empire of the Sun
He was on the run
Captured by the Japanese
For far more than a year and a [...]

JG Ballard appeared on the South Bank Show on ITV in the UK on Sunday. There was a long interview with JGB conducted by Melvyn Bragg and filmed at Shepperton Studios, plus an overview of Ballard’s career, a discussion of Kingdom Come, and contributions from Martin Amis, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. As [...]

Interview 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 [...]

by Simon Sellars

an image from John Foxx’s Cathedral Oceans project
John Foxx, the former lead singer of Ultravox, is an undisputed electronic music pioneer. Before Midge Ure came along, the band’s three Foxx-driven albums, Ultravox! (1977), Ha! Ha! Ha! (1978) and Systems of Romance (1978), fused near-future melancholy with icy man-machine interfaces and the remake/remodel aesthetic [...]

by Simon Sellars

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition
Ballardian presents an exclusive interview with Jonathan Weiss, director of The Atrocity Exhibition, the film based on the J.G. Ballard collection of ‘condensed novels’.
———————————————————————————————————————-
NOTE: This is a revised and expanded version of the original interview. The new additions are a reworked introduction, the addition of notes, [...]

Judging from this recent interview with Iain Sinclair, it appears that Ballard is to write a piece for an upcoming anthology of writings about London, to be published by Hamish Hamilton.
Petit, Sinclair, Moorcock and Ballard in the one place is A-OK by me.
“SINCLAIR: I take great delight in the apparently forgotten. As Ed Dorn said, [...]