Why I Want to Fuck Arnold Schwarzenegger
In the ongoing battle between the two movie stars: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Warren Beatty, there has already been a number of Ballardian moments. If Beatty actually throws his hat into the ring...
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Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of...
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.”...
View ArticleAt the Airport Hanger
BEATTY TRIES TO CRASH SCHWARZENEGGER RALLY By MICHAEL R. BLOOD Associated Press Writer SAN DIEGO Actors Warren Beatty and wife Annette Bening tried to crash a campaign appearance Saturday by Gov....
View ArticleJG Ballard vs Dan Melchior
Googling for an mp3 of Orson Welles monstering, for semantic crimes, the director of the frozen-peas radio spot he was appearing in, I instead ended up with J G Ballard and frozen peas — in the 2002...
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J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories, vols 1 & 2 (2006)
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...
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A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)
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...
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Hello America (1981)
OPENING LINE: ‘There’s gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere! Wake up! The streets of America are paved with gold!’. From the Carroll & Grad 1981 edition: A century after America’s financial collapse...
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Invisible Celebrity Literature
No Fear of the Future, a new group blog that’s recently come on line, features a jaw-dropping analysis of celebrity culture from the talented Chris Nakashima-Brown. It begins by outlining the...
View ArticleThom Two
Writer Tim Footman unpacks the Thom Yorke/Ballard thing (I posted on Yorkey’s Ballard quote yesterday): I referred to [J.G. Ballard's Crash] in some depth when discussing ‘Airbag’, the opening track of...
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Structural Burglary
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...
View ArticleThe Greatest
The Guardian has sparked off an unholy war: When the Guardian referred to Martin Amis as ‘Britain’s greatest living author’ last week, one reader was so outraged she threatened to emigrate – or worse....
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Ballardosphere Wrap-Up, Part 1
Photo: Stephen Hughes. Read recently… + Via Fanny Magnate, David Chandler’s essay on the work of photographer Stephen Hughes: Over the last five years Hughes has worked all over Europe, developing an...
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Ballardosphere Wrap-Up, Part 3
+ 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...
View ArticleMore on Myspace
As I’ve been taken to task regarding my last post about the J.G. Ballard Myspace profile, in hindsight I can see that my tongue had actually pierced my cheek, and for that I apologise. Just to clarify,...
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Sticking It to the Man
I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the image of musicians and artists, who have built a career on left ideals and a rigorous program of apparent anti-authoritarianism, accepting knighthoods,...
View ArticleQuote of the Day
Pertinent, in the wake of this and this: Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation...
View ArticleFantastical Literary Celluloid Icons
Back in 1986, Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) made an amusing cameo in Rodney Dangerfield’s fake-fart laden masterpiece Back to School. But did you also know that William Gibson appeared in Wild Palms alongside...
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The Brangelina Exhibition
‘If Dali Had Painted Angelina Jolie’, by 14. Copyright 2006. I’ve just discovered the Gallery of the Absurd, maintained by the artist known simply as ’14′ and devoted to her sharp, witty and...
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Atrocity II
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...
View ArticleAutopsies on Celebrity and Desire
More on the Dead Di meme, as Chris Petit reviews 12:23 by Eoin McNamee and The Accident Man by Tom Cain: The princess, as a largely self-invented figure, is a gift to fiction, not least because the...
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Ballardian Secession Theory
J.G. Ballard is being suggested as a nominee in the arts section of the Morgan Stanley Great Briton Awards, which seek ‘to explore, express and celebrate what it means to be British according to...
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Drowned Geoff
Image by Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez. The influence of BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh is spreading far and wide, so much so he is now featuring in a personality profile (disguised as a walking tour) in...
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'Meet you all the way, Rosanna yeah'
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. First up, Maxim Magazine, anointing the...
View ArticleMichael Jackson reads J.G. Ballard
According to Chris Nakashima-Brown: The Daily Mail reports on a recent sighting of the pop star on a late night bookstore run in Las Vegas. He apparently purchased a large quantity of SF. Begging the...
View ArticleCome in no. 27, your time is up
The Times has a list of the Greatest British Writers Since 1945. Ballard’s in there at no.25 no. 27, where he is appraised like so: With Empire of the Sun (1984), the fictionalised account of his...
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‘Genius eye for the killer detail’: Parsons, Harris & Myerson on Ballard
Newsnight Review: Tony Parsons, Kirsty Wark, Julie Myerson and John Harris. More Miracles discussion… Here’s a transcript of the Newsnight Review segment on BBC 2. Not as revealing as the interviews,...
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'Vomit, violence, tabloid architecture…'
The house that Sam built … from Pam. MelbPsy gets all Atrocity Exhibition on Sam Newman’s ass house: “As he stood beneath the fractured, glacial stare of Pamela Anderson, her linear geometry echoed a...
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Zodiac 3000
Dan Mitchell of Hard Mag writes with news of a very interesting exhibition he’s co-producing called “Zodiac 3000″ at the International Project Space in Birmingham. It’s one of a plethora of recent...
View ArticleIndexed out of existence…
Ballard’s “The Index” (1977) is a damnably clever short “story”, playing all sorts of games with the reader, with the act of writing, with existence itself. It tells the tale of a mysterious man named...
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The kid stays in the picture
ABOVE: SLJ in JGB’s RW: Ballardé with cheese? Like millions of other television viewers, I had already seen selected extracts from the film in numerous documentaries about the massacre, and I hardly...
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J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
The exhibition JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, celebrating the work and enduring influence of J.G. Ballard, opens tomorrow at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Please enjoy...
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Kosmopolis 08: Landing Gear
Photo: Simon Sellars. Sorry for the long absence — I promised ‘daily updates’, well, that didn’t happen. It’s taken me ages to get my thoughts down about Barcelona and Kosmopolis because the...
View ArticleJGB: A 'billionaire' in Shepperton?
I thought I’d share a lovely comment from Vicky, a reader of my Shepperton photo essay (which reminds me: I’m still to post the second part. I hope to do that very soon, even if it is almost a year...
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Michael Jackson's Facelift
From the files of Dr Ricardo Battista’s assistant, School of Specialization in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Melbourne, Australia. “As Michael Jackson reached middle age, the skin of both his...
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Review: Jeremy Reed’s West End Survival Kit
Jeremy Reed at the JG Ballard Memorial, 2009. Photo: Rick McGrath. West End Survival Kit, by Jeremy Reed. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906742-07-2. JEREMY REED IS A HUGELY...
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“Ambiguous aims”: a review of Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard [NSFW]
Adam McEwen. Honda Teen Facial, 2010. Boeing 747 undercarriage. Approximately: 137 13/16 x 118 1/8 x 71 11/16 inches (350 x 300 x 182 cm). JG Ballard’s writing has a strong connection to visual art,...
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A Fascist State? Another Look at Kingdom Come and Consumerism
The Bentall Centre. Photo by Fr3d.org. Reproduced under Creative Commons. by Mike Holliday Why do I dislike the Bentall Centre so much? Because it’s so… cretinous. [The consumers] seem to be moving...
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Myths of a Near Future: Simon Sellars, Bruce Sterling and V. Vale
The panel. From left to right: Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008. “Hello Barcelona. I hope everyone there is enjoying the show, if I’m allowed to call it that....
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RIP Elizabeth Taylor: A Ballardian Primer
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...
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Animal Spirits: A Ballardian Bestiary
by Matteo Pasquinelli The following is excerpted from Matteo Pasquinelli’s book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers / Institute of Network Cultures, December 2008)....
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‘No Original Response’: J.G. Ballard predicts Social Media, CCTV, Reality TV
Above: J.G. Ballard. Photo by Simon Durrant, from i-D magazine, 1987. Above: Excerpt from Ballard’s 1977 Vogue essay (via Gideon Defoe). Response to a post at Buzzfeed on how J.G. Ballard “predicted...
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Why I Want to Fuck Donald Trump
The following is excerpted from the Official Republican 2016 Presidential Survey, conducted by the National Republican Congressional Committee, PO Box 2837, Washington D.C. 20013. With apologies to...
View ArticleApplied Ballardianism forthcoming from Urbanomic in 2017
I’m excited to announce that my book, Applied Ballardianism: A Theory of Nothing, will be forthcoming from Urbanomic in late 2017. The publisher’s page for the book is here, and Urbanomic’s blurb is...
View ArticleJGB on Jordan
A JGB-quoting story from the Daily Telegraph, on the ‘news’ that popular glamour model Jordan is to ‘write’ two novels – Several heavyweights of the literary world were impressed to have an unexpected...
View ArticleWilliam Burroughs: Preface to The Atrocity Exhibition
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...
View ArticleHas Reese Witherspoon read Crash?
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...
View ArticleJG Ballard Was Not Killed in a Car Crash
Over at who2.com, they write: “Ballard, like actor Matthew Broderick, is an honorary member of our loop Death By Car“. He’s joined by the usual Ballardian suspects – Princess Di, Jimmy Dean – as well...
View ArticleAuthor’s Note: The Atrocity Exhibition
by J.G. Ballard (2001) Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person — John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe...
View ArticleMelborea Moronica: New ‘Depraved Species of Electric Flora’ Found Growing in...
;embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/25yOIOl79d4″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”350″> A Melbourne rugby reporter, Ben Davis, presents his live-to-air...
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