Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

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.”

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?

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

Here’s the last in our batch of transcripts of recent Miracles promotions: James Naughtie’s interview with JGB for BBC Radio 4.

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

Here’s a transcript of Philip Dodd’s recent BBC Radio 3 interview with JGB.

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

Here’s a new campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. But it doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling? Note the photographer: none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel.

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.

Recently, Toronto’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy passed on to Rick McGrath a binder containing a slew of Canadian JGB reviews, Ballardian esoterica and the jewel in the crown: a long, unpublished interview with Ballard from 1974.

Steve O. sent me a link to a photo shoot for America’s Next Top Model, on the subject of, wait for it, dead girls. It’s from March earlier this year, and even though seven months in the Ballardosphere is a very very long time, it still needs to be recorded. Steve writes, ‘I don’t know […]

‘Tourism is the great soporific. It’s a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there’s something interesting in their lives. It’s musical chairs in reverse. Every time the muzak stops people stand up and dance around the world, and more chairs are added to the circle, more marinas and Marriott hotels, so […]

A Melbourne rugby reporter, Ben Davis, is bashed on live TV while giving a report. Unsurprisingly, his attackers are caught, given the attack was broadcast to the entire nation. Ballardian? Absolutely. Let’s count the ways…

The shop mannequin and the crash-test dummy have always held a privileged place in Ballard’s fiction. Battered, broken and discarded, they housed the streaky veins of alienation and despair that marked The Atrocity Exhibition. Rendered with Ballard’s clinical, amoral gaze, they evoked the terminal stylisation wreaked by technology in Crash. Fused by nuclear radiation into […]

Recently, a man was reported to have died after slashing his throat with a Stanley knife in a Woolworths store in the UK in front of horrified shoppers. While I am wary of making light of this poor man’s plight by straining to find Ballardian resonance in every instance of violent consumerism and despair […]

Initially, this story reminded me just a little of Ballard’s ‘Billennium’, set in a severely overcrowded future in which a group of friends find uninhabited space sealed off from the oppressive density outside…
Eight artists snuck into the depths of Providence Place mall and built a secret studio apartment in which they stayed, on and off, […]

Please forward to anyone that may be interested …
TRIP: Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives
Manchester, 19-22 June 2008.
Call for Papers and Projects
* * Psychogeography *
* * Neogeography *
* * Deep topography *
* * Urban interventions *
* * […]

Former ad man Rick McGrath takes another look at Kingdom Come from ‘the perspective of marketing, advertising and psychopathology’. He also looks at the Metro-Centre website, used to promote the book, and asks, ‘The abattoir? Not too gloomy?’

+ Three lovely Ballardian riffs…
1) Dan Lockton over at the awesome Architectures of Control, a blog that analyses the ways in which products are designed to restrict user behaviour, guides us through a new initiative at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5: the removal of seating so that patrons have no choice but to spend great wads […]

© Metro-Centre, 2007.
Something is stirring over at our favourite shopping mall. After lying fallow for almost two months, the official blog of the Metro-Centre shopping centre in Brooklands stirs to life with a rather ominous poster campaign starring the failed talk-show host, David Cruise.
First, we were promised that ‘the wait is almost over’. And now, […]

Interview by Gwyn Richards & Simon Sellars

Toby Litt is an English novelist who published his first book, Adventures in Capitalism (a volume of short stories), in 1996, when he was 28. He’s since won praise for the dark inventiveness of his writing, a combination of cinematic prose, apocalyptic imagery and sharp wit that freely […]

Egyptian Ballard World: dead monorails hanging against the sky like guillotines (photo by Dubai Dave).
Dickens World is set to open next week, according to this report. It’s a recreation of ‘a dark, dirty and dank London…populated by thieves, murderers and ghosts…[with an] air of authenticity as it was built in consultation with experts from the […]

+ KILLING CARS

Rich, car-crashing idiot No. 2: Stefan Eriksson.
Over at The Wrong Advices, Dan writes, ‘After watching Eddie Griffin destroy a Ferrari Enzo I was reminded of some of the other times rich idiots have killed beautiful and expensive cars. I’ve put together a list of some of the more memorable crashes.’
My favourite is […]

i.m. Jean Baudrillard
by Benjamin Noys
———————————————————————————————————————-
In the wake of Jean Baudrillard’s death, Ballardian presents Benjamin Noys’s essay exploring the ‘point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J.G. Ballard’. This is a slightly modified version of the article that appeared as ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’, Ícone 9 (2006): 29-38, reproduced […]

David Smith is a blogger who came to Ballard “very late”. Having just finished Super-Cannes, however, he has posted a collection of links, reviews and musings relating to that book. It’s a useful primer for anyone wanting to excavate more about one of Ballard’s darkest visions.
Dig deep. Re-acquainting myself with these quotes, it’s interesting […]

Interview by Simon Sellars
Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman (which explains the pithy insights to come). He’s also the curator of what may be the world’s largest collection of J.G. Ballard first editions; he’s the ‘go-to man’ whenever a TV station or glossy mag does a rare feature on Ballard and needs […]

The infamous Texas Book Depository window, and the fatal frame from the Zapruder JFK assassination film.
Abraham Zapruder was a tourist in Dealey Plaza whose amateur cine-film captured the President’s tragic death. The Warren Commission concluded that frame 210 recorded the first rifle shot, which wounded Kennedy in the neck, and that frame 313 recorded the […]

REMINDER: The ‘call for papers’ deadline for ‘Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’ is three days away. See here for details, and here for more on the conference.
J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts, has posted a long and thoughtful rebuttal of Rob Liddle’s recent dismissal of Kingdom Come. I posted about […]

Cripes, they’re all at it! Mick over at Dead Flowers informs me that Thom Yorke has taken to quoting from Kingdom Come at the Radiohead group blog.
Go, Thom!
(But why the long face, always, man? Cheer up, OK? KC works out alright in the end.)

Can’t let this one go…
In a Sunday Times piece on the ‘curtailment of working-class pleasures’, Rod Liddle writes:
…what truly annoys me is … the way in which this government — and previous governments — view football supporters. If you’re unsure what this attitude is, read JG Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come.
This is, as usual, a […]

Photo: Simon Sellars (apologies for the crappy gif animation; bet you thought you’d never see the like outside myspace).
Here’s an intriguing article by Bill Christensen at Technovelgy about the next generation of animated billboards. The piece ends with Ballard’s short story, ‘The Subliminal Man’, and an even more intriguing next-next-gen proposition.
Digital billboards are starting […]

Mark Dery is back online (thanks for the tip, Chris). The occasion? Unpacking My Library, a response to a request from Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz for a list of favorite books (as David says, “Two years later, he’s come through. And I’m grateful. ‘Unpacking My Library’ is a veritable wunderkammer of printed matter.”)
Yes, it’s […]

OPENING LINE:
“All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West.” (from ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’).
I’m not covering every one of JGB’s short-story collections in this bibliography — with the release of the Complete Short […]

Interview by Simon Sellars

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
In the year that this website’s been in operation, it seems to have had a momentum — a secret logic — all its own. Our interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, John Foxx, Mike Ryan and Iain Sinclair — even the irascible Jonathan Weiss — have […]

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
On 14 September 2006 JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London — the evening was presented by Blackwell. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his age […]

In Diary: A Fascist’s Guide to the Premiership, published in New Statesman, JG Ballard previews the themes he unpacks in Kingdom Come. In this piece, JGB asks if the “English working class [is] re-tribalising itself” as a result of “football crowds rocking stadiums and bellowing anthems … taking part in political rallies without realising […]

OPENING LINE:
“Crossing frontiers is my profession.”
From the 1996 Flamingo edition:
“To an outsider, the retired British residents of the Spanish coastal resort of Estrella de Mar belong to an idyllic community, enjoying a lifestyle of constant cultural and sporting activity — based around the thriving Club Nautico. But the image is shattered when five people die […]

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).
From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:
The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the […]