Ballardian

Here are the entries in the 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. Congratulations to the winner, Ben Slater.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Nothing sorts memories from ordinary moments. They claim remembrance when they show their scars. Chris Marker. La Jetée. review by Simon Sellars The films of Chris Marker are often termed ‘essayist’, participating in a phenomenological play with deep roots in French intellectualism. Working within documentary and pseudo-documentary modes, they mimic the manner in which memory [...]

NBC News Link "CHICAGO — Bond was denied Friday for a 23-year-old woman accused of intentionally ramming her car into another vehicle at a Skokie intersection in a suicide attempt, killing three men from Chicago and injuring three others. Jeanette Sliwinski was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated battery [...]

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 [...]