Archive for the ‘fascism’ Category
By
Mike Holliday •
Jun 20th, 2009 •
Category:
Lead Story, crime, death of affect, fascism, features, horror
Mike Holliday gets to the bottom of the 1968 obscenity trial brought against Bill Butler and the Unicorn Bookshop, for stocking Ballard’s ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. As prosecuting counsel Michael Worsley asked of Ballard’s work, “Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?”
By
Simon Sellars Melb Psy •
May 27th, 2009 •
Category:
Australia, CCTV, Lead Story, advertising, alternate worlds, architecture, audio, boredom, consumerism, death of affect, deep time, fascism, features, hyperreality, leisure, micronations, occult, perception, photography, psychogeography, schizophrenia, surveillance, temporality, time travel, utopia
Simon Sellars, Mel Chilianis and Melb Psy take an audiovisual tour of Melbourne’s Crown Casino, seeking to map the coordinates of this micronational zone — consumer-driven control space with a raging need.
By
Simon Sellars •
Jun 15th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Iain Sinclair, William Burroughs, consumerism, fascism, sport
New interview with Ballard in the Guardian.
By
Simon Sellars •
May 23rd, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, Savoy Books, WWII, William Burroughs, alternate worlds, dystopia, fascism
A recent interview at the Burroughs site Reality Studio brings Ballard, Burroughs, Britton and Butterworth together … along with Arthur C. Clarke.
By
Simon Sellars •
Mar 11th, 2008 •
Category:
Australia, Ballardosphere, architecture, celebrity culture, fascism, media landscape, micronations, psychology, sport, television, urban revolt
MelbPsy gets all Atrocity Exhibition on the House that Sam Newman built, the ‘tabloid architecture’ sheathing yet another backyard Aussie micronation.
By
Dan OHara •
Jan 9th, 2008 •
Category:
Chris Marker, David Cronenberg, Germany, Steven Spielberg, WWII, architecture, dystopia, entropy, fascism, film, gated communities, interviews, urban decay, urban revolt, urban ruins, utopia
Dan O’Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a German mixed-media radio play based on High-Rise. Transposing the novel to Berlin in 2013, it references Nazism, notably Speer’s social engineering through architecture, on its way to exploring Ballard’s relevance to speculative models of German life.
By
Dan Lockton •
Jan 3rd, 2008 •
Category:
Lead Story, architecture, censorship, dystopia, fascism, features, psychology, speed & violence
According to Dan Lockton, one of the many ‘obsessions’ running through Ballard’s work is the effect of architecture on the individual. More than playful psychogeography, Ballard dissects architectural influence on his characters with technical precision.
By
Rick McGrath •
Jul 25th, 2007 •
Category:
advertising, consumerism, fascism, reviews, suburbia, urban revolt
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?’
By
Mike Holliday •
Jul 17th, 2007 •
Category:
Shepperton, fascism, features, flying
Cover detail: The Unlimited Dream Company (Cape 1979; artwork by Bill Botten).
Mike Holliday explains how to read J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel The Unlimited Dream Company as a fascistic work.
Ambiguity is one of the defining features of J.G. Ballard’s fiction. Consider, for example:
+ Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women – to what extent [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jun 27th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, advertising, consumerism, fascism, visual art
© 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, [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jun 13th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Salvador Dali, fascism, film, surrealism, visual art
There has been a Ballard backlash. Here are two of the more aggressive memes.
Ballard vs The Blogosphere
Ballard was recently interviewed by the Guardian in a series on writers’ rooms. In this feature he said, ‘The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
May 27th, 2007 •
Category:
Australia, Ballardosphere, Salvador Dali, academia, architecture, enviro-disaster, fascism, film, surrealism, visual art
Here I present the latest wrapup, not as extensive as I would like as I’m currently in Dubai trying to locate my missing passport, while entertaining the thought of spending a few days, maybe a week in the non-space of the Dubai International Airport until it turns up (hopefully a week; I’m trying to embrace [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Mar 27th, 2007 •
Category:
Australia, Jean Baudrillard, boredom, dystopia, fascism, features, speed & violence, suburbia, urban revolt
by Simon Sellars
Suburban Badlands: the Mill Park aftermath. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).
The system is self-regulating. It relies on our sense of civic responsibility. Without that, society would collapse. In fact, the collapse may even have begun.”
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J.G. Ballard. Millennium People (2003; p. 104).
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On the morning of 2 January 2007, Melbourne woke to disturbing [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Mar 6th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, architecture, consumerism, fascism, urban revolt
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 to [...]