Ballardian

Simon Sellars re-reads Ballardian space in light of the idiosyncratic, real-world phenomenon of micronations, tracing parallels between Ballard’s physical and psychological spaces and Marc Augé’s idea of ‘non-place’.

Parallels between Ballard’s Kingdom Come and Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

Kingdom Come, JoBurg style…

“Iain, I want you to blow up Bluewater.”

Out in the suburbs, the Birmingham-based Ballard exhibition Zodiac 3000 draws first blood…

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

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

Dan O’Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a German mixed-media radio play based on High-Rise. Transposing the novel to Berlin in 2013, it references Nazism, notably Speer’s social engineering through architecture, on its way to exploring Ballard’s relevance to speculative models of German life.

The shop mannequin and the crash-test dummy have always held a privileged place in Ballard’s fiction. Battered, broken and discarded, they housed the streaky veins of alienation and despair that marked The Atrocity Exhibition. Rendered with Ballard’s clinical, amoral gaze, they evoked the terminal stylisation wreaked by technology in Crash. Fused by nuclear radiation into [...]

Recently, a man was reported to have died after slashing his throat with a Stanley knife in a Woolworths store in the UK in front of horrified shoppers. While I am wary of making light of this poor man’s plight by straining to find Ballardian resonance in every instance of violent consumerism and despair in [...]

Please forward to anyone that may be interested … TRIP: Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives Manchester, 19-22 June 2008. Call for Papers and Projects * * Psychogeography * * * Neogeography * * * Deep topography * * * Urban interventions * * * Locative media * * * Collaborative Mapping * * * Between June [...]

Former ad man Rick McGrath takes another look at Kingdom Come from ‘the perspective of marketing, advertising and psychopathology’. He also looks at the Metro-Centre website, used to promote the book, and asks, ‘The abattoir? Not too gloomy?’

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 [...]

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 [...]

At the risk of incurring another bogey in the comments box, Dr John emails to inform me of a piece in the Guardian entitled ‘Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future’. John writes: ‘It might just be because I’ve been getting ready for a conference on J. G. Ballard, but this [...]

+ KILLING CARS Rich, car-crashing idiot No. 2: Stefan Eriksson. Over at The Wrong Advices, Dan writes, ‘After watching Eddie Griffin destroy a Ferrari Enzo I was reminded of some of the other times rich idiots have killed beautiful and expensive cars. I’ve put together a list of some of the more memorable crashes.’ My [...]

by Simon Sellars Suburban Badlands: the Mill Park aftermath. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper). The system is self-regulating. It relies on our sense of civic responsibility. Without that, society would collapse. In fact, the collapse may even have begun.” ——————————————————————– J.G. Ballard. Millennium People (2003; p. 104). ——————————————————————– On the morning of 2 [...]

David Smith is a blogger who came to Ballard “very late”. Having just finished Super-Cannes, however, he has posted a collection of links, reviews and musings relating to that book. It’s a useful primer for anyone wanting to excavate more about one of Ballard’s darkest visions. Dig deep. Re-acquainting myself with these quotes, it’s interesting [...]

The infamous Texas Book Depository window, and the fatal frame from the Zapruder JFK assassination film. Abraham Zapruder was a tourist in Dealey Plaza whose amateur cine-film captured the President’s tragic death. The Warren Commission concluded that frame 210 recorded the first rifle shot, which wounded Kennedy in the neck, and that frame 313 recorded [...]

“Believe me, the next revolution is going to be about parking.” (J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.) It’s becoming harder to keep up with the swelling tsunami of Ballardian world events. First we had to come to terms with the hidden meaning behind the Lisa Nowak story and Australia’s recent flag-waving menace. Then we had to wait [...]

Beware the water cops (photo: Sandy Scheltema; courtesy Age newspaper) Here in Victoria we’re undergoing a severe drought; heavy water restrictions are in force and things are projected to get much worse. A sign of the times is the appearance of “water vigilantes”, as reported in the Age newspaper: MARGARET Norriss is living in fear. [...]

OPENING LINE: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” From the opening scene of Laing tucking into his canine dinner — the spoils of urban warfare — to the final [...]

OPENING LINE: “25 August, 1988. Where to start?” This novella is just 87 pages long. Ballard calls it a ‘whydunit’ (rather than a ‘whodunit’), and it’s as uncanny as that implies. The shadow of Columbine hangs over this work (or, rather, vice versa). The murders happened shortly after 8 o’clock on the morning of 25 [...]

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 it, [...]

OPENING LINE: “A small revolution was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed.” From the 2003 Flamingo edition: Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like another [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It started Monday when their first plane blew a tire on takeoff, dumped fuel over the ocean and circled back to Los Angeles International Airport to land in a spray of sparks, shedding 200 pounds of rubber and metal on the runway. 45-Hour Delay: Nonstop Plight Passengers on an Air India flight endure hours on [...]

An essay in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine suggests that the recent troubles in Paris were High-Rise meets Super-Cannes — anger and aggression inculcated by architecture. But you already knew that. Revolting High Rises (registration required) ‘The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame [...]

A series of Photos from the scene of February 2005′s riots.

This one has it all — submerged flyovers, apartment dwellers fighting their way to the top floors, oil tankers deposited miles inland like drowned giants, refugee colonies in the 1970s sports arena, urban citizens reduced to Hobbesian looters overnight — too bad it’s nonfiction.

From the Capri Films website: TITLE: HIGH-RISE (Feature Film – in Development) SYNOPSIS: From J.G. Ballard, the author of the best sellers, COCAINE NIGHTS and EMPIRE OF THE SUN, comes an unsettling and unforgettable tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control. The tower’s affluent tenants are bent on an orgy [...]

Ballard-referencing article on the gentrification/renaissance of high rises.