Ballardian

With the sad news of Elizabeth Taylor’s passing, the time seems right to review the appearance of this enigmatic actress across a significant chapter in Ballard’s work, spanning the publication of the experimental story ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ in 1966 through to 1973 and the notorious Crash.

Probably of no interest to anyone but me, but here goes: top 10 most-read posts on ballardian.com in 2009; top 10 search-engine phrases leading visitors to the site in 2009; and top 10 links from other sites in 2009.

The aesthetic of the advertisement appears again and again in J.G. Ballard’s work. Here, Rick McGrath explores Ballard’s fascination with the structure of advertising, and the role of the advertising man himself, examining ersatz ads in detail right across the body of JGB’s work.

Mike Holliday examines one of the strangest, most obscure artifacts of Ballard’s career: the concrete poetry and graphic art that make up ‘J.G. Ballard’s Court Circular’. As Mike discovers, even the most unremarkable of Ballard’s writings can repay close attention.

Joanne McNeil on women characters in Ballard.

Steven Meisel: rejected by Vogue Italia, embraced by ballardian.com.

Ballard in Esquire.

Here’s another republished interview, this time from 2005 as Mitchell and Ford probe JGB about his infamous 1970 ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition, which elicited drunken aggression from its bemused audience.

Jordi Costa, the curator of J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium, currently exhibiting at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, gifts us this incisive analysis of the major themes in Ballard’s work. Accompanying the essay is the alternate version of the exhibition’s promo trailer.

Press release with fuller information and accompanying images for JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, opening today at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

Wim Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray art echoes The Atrocity Exhibition and the illustrations of Phoebe Gloeckner. WARNING: this post is indisputably unsafe for work. No, seriously: you have been warned.

Info on a new volume of Ballard criticism, edited by Jeannette Baxter.

In 2007 I toured Shepperton using Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company as my guidebook. Here are the results of that neurological survey, born from the torsion of “every cell in my body waiting at the end of a miniature runway”.

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.”

It’s official: Ballard is the 28th most erotic writer in London.

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

How strange is this: Rosanna Arquette, and Crash, popping up in all sorts of places. This film, Ballard’s story, still packs a powerful psychological enema.

This disturbing photo feature focuses on peeping toms in Japan and Kohei Yoshiyuki, the photographer who documented them in the 1970s. Listen to Philip Gefter’s voiceover: he notes the triple trangsression here (eminently worthy of Crash as it so happens), involving the couples who have sex in public, the peeping toms observing them, and the [...]

Two readers, Alex and GH, wrote in to direct my attention to this news item, in which a listed US astronaut drives 900 miles to kidnap a rival for another astronaut’s love — wearing nappies to avoid toilet breaks. As GH writes, “This news story, reported in the New York Times, reminded me of several [...]

It’s been a bit quiet around these parts. Sorry. Something’s brewing, though…like a wind from nowhere, sweeping through London Town… …:: Incoming (soonish) + News on next year’s International JG Ballard Conference + More interviews exploring the Ballard continuum across time and space + Guest posts from guest bloggers Subscribe for notification of updates as [...]

———————————————————————————— Lyle Hopwood uncovers a lost Ballard work, apparently the only surviving fragment from JGB’s novelization of David Cronenberg’s film of Alien, before the studio infamously got cold feet and replaced Cronenberg with Ridley Scott and Ballard with Alan Dean Foster. ———————————————————————————— It’s only the cat, Ripley. Squatting in the brine strained from the ore [...]

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 [...]

‘Obscene mannequins’. ‘Conceptual deaths’. The eroticisation of violence in the media landscape… the stunning ‘State of Emergency’ spread in the current Vogue Italia seems to come straight out of JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition… A few weeks ago, I asked whether it would be possible ‘for there to be a pornography, sponsored by Dior or Chanel, [...]

OPENING LINE: “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.” If The Drowned World was the book which cemented Ballard’s literary reputation (in Britain, at least), then Crash was almost certainly the one which made him a non-entity in America’s eyes. Following on from publisher Nelson Doubleday’s outrage at an earlier Ballard story, ‘Why I Want [...]

OPENING LINE: “In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?” The Unlimited Dream Company is “one of the titles featured in Anthony Burgess’ Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939″. It’s also one of Ballard’s most surprising and underrated works, and deeply personal, too, given that it takes place in his home [...]

Here’s a Vogue Italia photo shoot by Steven Meisel that posits supermodels as new-age terrorists (thanks for the link, FJ Torres). As Tim has already commented, “If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping on a supermodel’s throat forever.” Yes, it’s Ballardian. Yes, it’s JGB’s imagined “sinister marriage between sex and technology”, [...]

Over at k-punk a few months back, Mark posted a radical thesis that positioned Basic Instinct 2 as the unofficial sequel to Cronenberg/Ballard’s Crash: [Catherine] Tramell returns in the second film as a camp vamp whose persona owes more to Ballard than to film noir. Catherine is a name Ballard has often used, and Basic [...]

OPENING LINE: “Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun.” I have a real soft spot for The Kindness of Women, an autobiographical work that’s loosely described as a sequel to Empire of the Sun. Here, Ballard is honest, self-deprecating and [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Here’s another completely random Ballard-referencing quote plucked completely from its context in time and space. It’s from Mr Will Self himself this time, and it’s taken from an interview he did to promote his novel How the Dead Live: PENGUIN: You don’t belong to any one school, who do you read or admire? WILL SELF: [...]

Military church, Tinian, © Dan Norton 2006 Thanks to Iain X from the JGB Mailing List for this link, a series of photos taken by a ‘seabee’ stationed on the North Pacific, Micronesian island of Tinian during WWII. As the site’s author, Dan Norton, says, “These photos were developed by my grandfather in his clandestine [...]

Playboy has announced its ’25 Sexiest Novels of All Time’, with Crash coming in at No. 5. That’s remarkable, considering the manuscript was initially rejected by a publisher’s reader with the warning, ‘This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish’. From Playboy: “Crash by J.G Ballard (1973) Plot: Group of Londoners discovers that they [...]

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, [...]

Porn sites love Ballard; I swear our site statistics turn up the oddest links. Enough to make a clean-living chap like me faint from shock. A hardcore fetish site called Goregasm linked to our ‘JG Ballard: Live in London‘ article. Upon following the link back, I discovered a corner of the web that was fairly [...]

Thanks to Tim from the JGB Yahoo group for this link… Saturday February 11, 2006 The Guardian Ambit 182 Autumn 2005 (£6.50. UK subscriptions £25. www.ambitmagazine.co.uk) “Edward Paolozzi, the pop artist who died a few months ago, was a contributor to Ambit for many years. In discussions for what would turn out to be his [...]

What we’ve hinted at on Ballardian (ie JG Ballard’s Enlargement Phalloplasty; Why I Want to fuck John Howard), some people have ‘examined’ (ooh, err…nurse!) in a…ahem….’full frontal’ (ooh, vicar!) no-holds barred fashion. I picked up from our stats that a site called Fetish Fish has linked to our Bruce Sterling/JG Ballard interview in a piece [...]

Over at the esteemed Pervscan

Bruce Sterling is a prolific science-fiction writer, futurist, social critic and design professor, best known for his bestselling novels and seminal short fiction, and as the editor of the Mirrorshades anthology that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre. His nonfiction includes works of futurism such as Tomorrow Now; a regular column and blog for Wired; and his [...]

by Annik Hovac GRAVITY’S PEAK IS SURVIVABLE “About midnight, Diana walks out, all green eyes and friendly breast velocity. Dodi, her Prince, is there to sweep her away from the insatiable paparazzi.” The following extract is presented by the JG BALLARD INSTITUTE for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra. “On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana [...]

by Andrés Vaccari The following is an excerpt from an official report prepared by Andrés Vaccari, on behalf of the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra. DISCLAIMER: The following photos have been modified by the patients referenced by this report. The JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra [...]

From BBC Online, Sunday, 25 September 2005 ” The crew of a fishing boat blocked emergency radio frequencies for hours as they watched an erotic film. The crew of the Blyth-based Oceania accidentally left their radio switched to the emergency channel on Thursday as they were off the North East coast. They then settled down [...]

Another interview with Cronenberg puffing ‘A History of Violence’, with a different take on ‘Crash’ – Q: When Crash came out, a lot of people took it literally and thought it was stupid — how can you get turned on by a car crash? — instead of thinking of it as a metaphor. I mean, [...]

Good interview with David Cronenberg in Canada’s Toro Magazine, including a brief exchange on Crash – What happens when you get an actor who says no to a piece of direction? I’ve never had that. There was a problem, wasn’t there, with Elias Koteas doing a gay scene in Crash? Yeah. But he did it. [...]

From the Guardian, August 7, 2005. The King of Kinky "Helmut Newton was a photographer who never saw the point of not overstating the obvious: in one infamous shoot, he placed a horse’s saddle on a beauty posing in riding jodhpurs on a bed on all fours; in another the women sported medical corsets and [...]

Lonely hearts among the business parks of the M4

The New York Times recently reported on the phenomenon of Los Angeles paparazzi inventing their own photo ops by crashing their cars into those of their celebrity targets. “Ms. [Cameron] Diaz recalled walking in the street with Mr. [Justin] Timberlake and a friend and his dog about two years ago, when a photographer in a [...]

From Metro, July 25-Aug 2 2005. Silicon Alleys: Machine Love by Gary Singh “THERE’S NO BETTER way to celebrate the inaugural San Jose Grand Prix Champ Car race than to quote legendary British author J.G. Ballard. You see, his 1973 novel Crash is so delightfully vulgar that David Cronenberg just had to finally make a [...]

JG Ballard, the author of Crash and Empire Of The Sun, said the demand for female fiction was in complete contrast to the 1960s when men were the main buyers of novels. excerpted from the Telegraph, 24/7/05. JG BALLARD SAYS: “I think 30 years ago, men were the main buyers of novels because they had [...]

by William Burroughs (1970) The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual [...]