Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Another installment in Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of archival German Ballard interviews: a 1982 conversation conducted by Werner Fuchs and Joachim Körber.

Drawing inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars in 1970, the Crashman presents his own festival of Atrocity films: aviation disasters set to musical soundtracks.

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

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…

Lest you have any doubt that Mr Ballard is in fact Mr Rent-a-Quote, here he is, commenting on costume dramas, of all things, for the Observer:
The fear of some of our best contemporary writers is that the British love of classic adaptations reflects an unhealthy obsession with the past.
Novelist JG Ballard is blunt about […]

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McGrath a binder containing a slew of Canadian JGB reviews, Ballardian esoterica and the jewel in the crown: a long, unpublished interview with Ballard from 1974.

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…

Image from Corridor #5, in which this interview appeared.
Recently, my friend Keith emailed to tell me he’d come across a rare Ballard interview from 1974. It was published in Corridor, a small-press magazine that has been described as ‘a cheaper, thinner, New Worlds [featuring] many of the same authors’.
Corridor was the first partnership […]

While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted […]

This is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately):
For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule of […]

‘If Dali Had Painted Angelina Jolie’, by 14. Copyright 2006.
I’ve just discovered the Gallery of the Absurd, maintained by the artist known simply as ‘14′ and devoted to her sharp, witty and frightening caricatures of A-list celebrities. There’s TomKat recast as TomRat — two furry, grotesque rodents cradling their hideous offspring; there’s The Three Disgraces: […]

i.m. Jean Baudrillard
by Benjamin Noys
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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 […]

The Klaxons’ CD “Myths of the Near Future” lifts its title from the J.G. Ballard story of the same name. They namecheck Ballard in their songs, as well as the other Killer B — Burroughs. (It’s amazing they didn’t jam Phil Dick in there, too.) Yes, it’s all rather old hat for me to […]

Left: Ballard’s author pic from the Varsity student newspaper (image & PDF courtesy Rick McGrath).
Mike Holliday has uploaded J.G. Ballard — A Collector’s Guide, an in-depth information resource designed “as a ‘helping hand’ to anyone interested in collecting books, stories, and other material by the British author J. G. Ballard”. There’s a lot of […]

OPENING LINE:
“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”
For many, The Atrocity Exhibition is […]

OPENING LINE:
‘There’s gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere! Wake up! The streets of America are paved with gold!’.
From the Carroll & Grad 1981 edition:
A century after America’s financial collapse and the climactic upheavals of the 1990s, Wayne stows away on SS Apollo, bound for the New World on a voyage of rediscovery. He and the crew […]

OPENING LINE:
“Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.”
There’s not much left to say about the autobiographical Empire, perhaps Ballard’s most popular book and the work that catapulted […]

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 […]

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).
From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; […]

One of the sources for the death of affect is the distancing from community and a sense of shared existence brought about by the technological management of reality. There is a central paradox here: while the technical construction of collective time (through the engineered events in the media) tends to produce an instant ‘real-time’ that […]

From the Guardian, Saturday March 4, 2006.
“Look back at Empire
JG Ballard waited 40 years before writing about his experiences in a Japanese internment camp. Here he remembers how Hollywood hijacked his childhood memories to create a deeply moving film.
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades […]

Now screening in Seattle. Sounds tedious. But what do critics know?
“Peep “TV” Show
PRO: Watching Yutaka Tsuchiya’s Peep “TV” Show is a lot like reading J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition—both are not easy to get through but are vital works of art. Peep “TV” Show is about a society (contemporary Tokyo) that is mediated to the […]

interview by Simon Sellars

Isabelle Jenniches, originally from Germany, is a multimedia artist now based in California. With collaborator Stefan Kunzmann she staged a theatre adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel Concrete Island at the Theater de Balie, Amsterdam, in 2002. The performance incorporated aspects of Butoh as well as an industrial/ambient soundtrack, projections and video; it […]

by Pippa Tandy

“In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality – the reality we inhabit – almost as if it were a cadaver, or let’s say, the contents of a special kind of forensic inquisition… I regard all these as data which will play their role in whatever hypothesis […]

by J.G. Ballard (1995)
The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising […]

by J.G. Ballard (2001)
Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person — John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Together they helped to form the culture of celebrity that played such a large role in the […]