Ballardian

Still from ‘Shepperton’s Oracle’, dir. Thomas Cazals, 2007.

Ballardiana, Part 1
Via Podcast Pickle, I found a rendition of ‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’, Kevin Patrick Mahoney’s ‘iconoclastic homage to the great author’:

Oh Jim,
We can’t get enough of him
In Empire of the Sun
He was on the run
Captured by the Japanese
For far more than a year and a day.

Oh Jim,
Please tell me your secret:
How did you become the pet
Of so many women?
Was it their kindness?
Or just sheer blindness?

Oh Jim,
Please invite me to your next bash.
We could have a car crash
Together. (I’ve always seen the erotic potential of that).

Jim,
Please let me visit your Concrete Island
It’s much better than Thailand
At this time of year.
Please let me be the one
To share your Empire of the Sun.”

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Kevin Patrick Mahoney, ‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’.
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Cheeky bugger… Here’s the audio version, and here’s the ‘video’ version with suitably dodgy, compressed graphics.

Mahoney’s half pisstake/half tribute highlights the cliches of Ballard’s public image, the hypercompressed Shanghai-Shepperton-Empire-Crash timeline perpetuated by the media in every single JGB profile, a profile that, as I’ve argued before, erects a serious barrier to a deeper understanding of the man’s work. But Mahoney’s good for mild laughs, too: the delivery puts me in mind of the sketch in (the largely mediocre) Little Britain where Ray McCooney is loath to divulge the secret of his tomato soup to his guests.

Ballardiana, Part 2
Playing a straighter bat, Rick McGrath reports that in 1988, “Canada’s national radio corporation broadcast a series of 30-minute radio dramas, based on seven short stories of JG Ballard, for its long-running program, “The Vanishing Point”. The series was produced by Bill Lane in the CBC’s Toronto studios. … Lauded at the time, these forgotten gems explore the dramatic aspects of JGB’s early short stories within an auditory medium.”

Now, the indefatigable Rick has encoded all seven into mp3 format: ‘A Question of Re-entry’, ‘The Dead Astronaut’, ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’, ‘Low Flying Aircraft’, ‘News From The Sun’, ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ and ‘Escapement’.

These are perfect for whacking into the iPod and cruising your local shopping mall, airport terminal, satellite array, local high street, or motorway underpass (or prisoner-of-war internment camp, Mr Mahoney) for true heightened consciousness and unpeeling of the layers of deep time buried under the surface. There’s some interesting, dark-ambient sound design there, too. I still reckon it would be interesting to hear a British voice utter Ballard’s dialogue, not because I’m an Anglophile, but for reasons I’ve already banged on about elsewhere: there’s a statement buried somewhere that Ballard’s making about Britain, however obliquely. It’s a bit like hearing Barry Nelson, the first man to play James Bond, threaten Peter Lorre’s Le Chiffre in his American voice. But to be fair, as Ballard’s career progressed, his characters and situations became more and more ‘placeless’, flattened cyphers able to be slotted into Western society interchangeably. Still, I reckon Chris Petit would argue the toss on this one, but that entire argument is for another post…

Ballardiana, Part 3
Finally, I previously posted about ‘Shepperton’s Oracle’, the film that French filmmaker Thomas Cazals was making about Ballard, and about Shepperton. It sounded a hybrid doco/faction type deal, but from this latest news appears to be mostly fiction/faction. It sounds intriguing, and should be online around February.