Ballardian

Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopian account of consumerism as a type of ’soft fascism’, received lukewarm reviews and suggestions that the author was, perhaps, finally losing his touch. Others were eager to point to parallels between it and events around us: aggressive car commercials, racist behaviour by sports fanatics. In this article, Mike Holliday re-examines Kingdom Come and asks: can we really equate consumerism with fascism?

New interview with Ballard in the Guardian.

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.

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 [...]

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 dystopian fantasy set in [...]

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 been [...]

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:
“The suburbs dream of violence.”
From the 2006 Fourth Estate edition:
Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel, is driving out to Brooklands, a motorway town on the A25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the middle of this apparently peaceful town, when a [...]

http://www.burj-al-arab.com/tennis

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 and her lover Dodi [...]

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 film out of [...]

Alan Taylor’s Diary
"BY the time 2012 comes around I should be in tip-top shape for whatever challenge arises. One must be there – I keep telling myself – or be elsewhere. Certainly, one should not underestimate the importance of the games coming to London. … For a true sense of proportion, though, let us [...]

This article in the Guardian references JG Ballard in the following fashion:
"The future, JG Ballard reckons, is a cocktail of those elements: the ennui of edge-land architecture, airport roads the same everywhere, and highly-visible tanks patrolling the perimeter fence. If an English cricket team ventures to Pakistan it will be accorded, so the relevant [...]