RealityStudio.org

From today's Chicago Tribune; quite nicely done:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/hc- ... 9696.story

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... llard.html

I love this:

"Ballard spent the late 1960s editing Ambit magazine and socialising with fellow writers and artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Having developed a fascination for car crashes he frequently surprised fellow dinner guests by producing photographs of his girlfriend’s crash injuries.

If she was also present Ballard would persuade her to show her scars."

Imagine the party:

"Show them your gash dahlink. No, not that one, the one from the crash!"

Sick jokes aside, what amazes me about the above atrocity exhibition quote is how totally fucking insensitive and prickish it is. I mean, Ballard was obviously getting a kick out of shocking party guests...but meanwhile it's his poor scarred-for-life girlfriend who has to bear the brunt of the look-at-the-freakshow attention he's looking for. I mean, nobody takes well to being scarred, but for women it's a much more serious thing, an affront to their vanity and insult to their existence and beauty in general. To draw attention to this seems very misogynistic and cruel and hurtful and stupid. Then again, I suppose we don't know what his girlfriend (whom I would assume was Claire) was into, so you never know.

Just a thought.

Talk about fucking prescient; this is from 1994:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzXOHMgMKLA

Just a quick bump, the film adapation of The Atrocity Exhibition is now available as NTSC DVD (rather than PAL) here: http://mondopopcinema.com/product_info.php/products_id/487

you can read an (unflattering) review of the film here: http://www.ballardian.com/weiss-atrocity-exhibition-review

I liked the film. It's a really faithful adaption of the book and, when you consider that it was a totally independent effort, it's pretty impressive.

edited down to say a 30 minute short film, i think it would've been quite powerful; as is, i found it tedious, but i applaud the director for attempting it. a brave failure imo.

with thanks to simon's twitter page

Home, directed by Ursula Meier and written by Antoine Jaccoud and Olivier Lorelle, is a bewitching dream of a film. It has little in common with most contemporary cinema, evoking instead the tantalising although sadly unrealisable possibility of Jacques Tati making a movie based on the fiction of JG Ballard.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film ... eview.html

Speaking of JG Ballard and moving media; you can almost see the brain moving behind the intense inquisitive staring eyes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT2eECKvdTc

I may well have read this many moons ago, when I was (as I still am) an absolute hardcore Ballard interview junkie, but anybody have any idea how Ballard became obsessed with car crashes and to write Crash?

a quick look at the crash wiki page brought up this gem:

Ballard (as author) talking about his reasons for writing the book: "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror"

the why of it (cars & crashes) he explains nicely in the clip you provided.

Yeah, I fucking love that quote, and still use it myself when I'm feeling pissed off. Ballard regretted writing Crash towards the end of his life. Manic Street Preachers used a sample of the vomit quote being said by Ballard in their song 'Mausoleum Rent', a demented song (from the classic 1994 depression album The Holy Bible) about the Nazi deathcamps:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddYXpBXpIlM

Lyricist Richey Manic (who committed suicide shortly after the album came out) was a big Ballard/Burroughs fan; seen a pic of him in a RE/Search WSB shirt. But the quote still hardly explains the man being obsessed by car crashes. Just saw him give a rebuttal of the 'car crash photos at parties' allegation in a 1994 Guardian interview, though, so who knows.

There's quite a long and interesting discussion between Cronenberg and JGB at the London BFI shortly after Crash was shown at Cannes. I can't seem to find the audio online anywhere. I have the two MP3s (~80mb) and would be happy to email or post them somewhere online if people are interested. I think there may be some mention of Cronenberg's work on the Naked Lunch film, but I could be wrong.

JGB's was actually involved in quite a serious car crash (I recall from one of the obituaries last year someone mentioning that whenever they met him they were terrified of his driving) although, to my surprise, the crash actually occurred shortly after writing the book, rather than before. He discusses it a bit in the following short film, I think:

http://ommane.blogspot.com/2007/12/jgballards-unlimited-dream-company_20.html

what's your source for that? i'd certainly be interested in hearing why he would regret writing his most infamous book; his naked lunch really; a book thats review by a publishers' reader he prided above all others: 'do not publish. this man is beyond psychiatric help.'

"Crash is an autobiographical novel in the sense that it is about my inner life, my imaginative life. It is true to that interior life, not the life I have actually lived."
--J.G. Ballard

He says it in this late interview about Miracles of Life:

http://www.ballardian.com/up-a-kind-of- ... n-miracles

The pertinent section from the interview:

"JN: This kind of dissection of consumerism, or of the way people behave, I suppose, was the same process that was going on in Crash, which became a cult book in many ways, was filmed, was still being read many years later when similar books maybe passed away, quite quickly, and it involved a narrator, who became extraordinarily involved; erotically, emotionally, in violent ways, sometimes, with corpses, with people being cut up on motorways — a terribly dark story — it does seem to be though, quite close to the centre of your life as a writer, that vision, the vision that’s in that book.

JGB: That’s probably true, and in some ways, I regret it, I mean, now and again I open Crash. I think, my god, this is horrific, I mean, this man is clearly mad — and then, you know, it takes me a while to realise that — the JG Ballard, who brought up three very happy children and…

JN: By that time, the time you wrote that book, it would have been eight or nine years after your wife’s death, in the early 70s.

JGB: Early 70s yes. I find it a shocking book to read, I mean I literally have to put it down and take a few breaths. In a way it’s a sort of psychopathic hymn, there’s almost a religious dimension to it, in a peculiar way.

JN: In some ways Crash is about your life as a writer, because it’s about a narrator who is involved and who’s also exposed, in the course of the book, who’s feelings are laid bare, which of course is what writing’s all about.

JGB: Yes, and I think, I laid myself bare there in a way that — I mean it’s a cry of anguish, in a way — it’s a cry of outrage — you know the… I felt, it took me a long while to get of my wife’s death and it’s something I was reminded of every day — I was making sausage and mash for her three children. I think it was another attempt to make, you know, two and two equal five, once you’ve cracked that particular nut, if it’s possible to do so, you know everything seems to be a bit easier, but I’m not sure it is."

well that's quite different than saying: ballard regretting writing it. well it is to me anyhow.

JGB:....I've always wanted as many of my novels as possible to be filmed and Crash is really, I think, my best novel, my most original novel and in a way my most autobiographical novel, notwithstanding Empire of the Sun, which was actually about my childhood in Shanghai. Crash is an autobiographical novel in the sense that it's about my inner life -- my imaginative life -- it's true to that, not that life I actually have led. I've always wanted to see my novels filmed and Crash most of all.

http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/daze ... rview.html