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Archive for the ‘Michael Moorcock’ Category

“Der Visionär des Phantastischen”: An Interview with J.G. Ballard

By Dan O'Hara • May 4th, 2008 •

Category: Germany, Lead Story, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, 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.



‘The Crashman’: An Experiment in Applied Internet Ballardianism

By Crashman • Apr 8th, 2008 •

Category: David Cronenberg, Freud, Lead Story, Michael Moorcock, WWII, YouTube, censorship, death of affect, features, film, flying, humour, media landscape, music, psychopathology, speed & violence, sport, war

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.



‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld

By Dan O'Hara • 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.



Grave New World: Introduction, Part 2

By Dominika Oramus • Nov 13th, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Salvador Dali, Shanghai, Steven Spielberg, WWII, William Burroughs, academia, features, science fiction, surrealism

by Dominika Oramus

World’s first hydrogen bomb explosion, Eniwetok Atoll, 1952.

Dominika Oramus teaches Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. The following is Part Two of the introduction to Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, her post-doctoral thesis. Grave New World currently exists as a (very) limited […]



Grave New World: Introduction, Part 1

By Dominika Oramus • Nov 5th, 2007 •

Category: David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Jean Baudrillard, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Salvador Dali, WWII, William Burroughs, academia, death of affect, dystopia, features, psychiatry, science fiction, surrealism, technology, urban ruins

Dominika Oramus reads Ballard’s work as a record of the gradual internal degeneration of Western civilization: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West.



Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard

By Simon Sellars • Oct 3rd, 2007 •

Category: Brian Eno, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, William Burroughs, entropy, interviews, music, paranormal, urban ruins

Cousin Silas has created two albums inspired by the works of J.G. Ballard. Simon Sellars spoke to Silas about Ballard, Lovecraft, Forteana, Moorcock, Eno, Tarkovsky — all the essentials.



BallardoTube

By Simon Sellars • Sep 8th, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, William Burroughs, YouTube, archival, audio, film, filmography, television

I’ve created a YouTube outpost for this site, divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music.



Iain Sinclair’s Ballard Biography

By Simon Sellars • Aug 18th, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Chris Petit, David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, film, psychogeography

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 […]



J.G. Ballard’s Experiment in Chemical Living

By Mike B • Aug 1st, 2007 •

Category: Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shepperton, William Burroughs, advertising, features, invisible literature

by Mike Bonsall

J.G. Ballard in 1960. In the background is a poster of his ‘Project for a new novel’, made two years earlier.
Chemistry & Industry … was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it […]



J.G. Ballard: The Corridor Interview

By Simon Sellars • Jul 20th, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, archival, literature, media landscape, science fiction

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 […]



Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

By Mike Holliday • Jul 9th, 2007 •

Category: Brian Eno, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, William Burroughs, audio, film, interviews, literature

Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and JGB’s partner Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).
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Interview by Mike Holliday
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Michael Moorcock has been a prolific writer and editor for the last five decades. Born in London, he was editing his first magazine by the age of seventeen, and started writing genre fiction professionally as soon as […]



‘If I had a pound for every time someone mentioned psychopathology’: A Review of the First International Conference on the Work of J.G. Ballard

By Simon Sellars • May 10th, 2007 •

Category: Brian Eno, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, academia, alternate worlds, architecture, gated communities, literature, reviews

The UEA Studio: Conference Headquarters (photo: Simon Sellars).
I attended From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard at the University of East Anglia on the weekend, and I’m suffering a bit of a comedown. I always get a bit melancholy when these temporary autonomous zones collapse and everyone returns to virtual communication. Especially […]



Flat block of two dimensions

By Simon Sellars • Apr 19th, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Michael Moorcock, audio, gated communities, suicide, urban revolt

Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Simon Sellars.
All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of their […]



More on Liddle and Ballard

By Simon Sellars • Feb 12th, 2007 •

Category: Australia, Ballardosphere, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, consumerism, politics, sport

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 […]



‘When in Doubt, Quote Ballard’: An Interview with Iain Sinclair

By timc • Aug 29th, 2006 •

Category: Chris Petit, David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, William Burroughs, architecture, film, flying, interviews, politics, psychogeography, utopia

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 to […]



JG Ballard: Psychonaut of Inner Space

By Simon Sellars • Jul 7th, 2006 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, science fiction

These days, with all manner of theorists, futurists, architects, musos, journos, self-mutilators and even UFO freaks claiming JG Ballard as one of their very own, it’s easy to forget that the man with his finger firmly impressed on the cult of today once wrote what was considered to be actual science fiction, albeit of a […]



J.G. Ballard to Contribute to New Iain Sinclair Project

By Simon Sellars • Feb 16th, 2006 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Chris Petit, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, psychogeography

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, […]