August 2008

ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation of Tiny Colour Movies, a selection of found-film fragments. Regular readers will recall that I interviewed Foxx in 2006, when the TCM album had just been released. At the time John was maintaining the line that the album was the soundtrack to a found-film collection owned by one Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, who, we were told, collects home movies and ‘repurposed movie fragments’, indeed any type of film produced outside...

I saw George Romero’s zombie flick Dawn of the Dead for the first time at the Melbourne International Film Festival last night. What a super film. What a statement. And very, very funny too. And in fact very reminiscent of Kingdom Come, for Dead, like KC, also features a sealed-off shopping mall in which a band of resistance fighters attempt to restart a micro society, sustained yet ultimately imprisoned by the trappings of consumer capitalism.
The mall in both Ballard and Romero becomes a city, a country, a galaxy, a self-sustaining micronational state seceding from reality, a State of mind absorbing and zombifying all it touches, and the faceless, cartoonish football hordes in KC are consumer zombies as much as the walking dead in Romero are metaphorically intended to be.
Yet, if you tweak your perspective just a little, the survivors in both could conversely be read as the oppressors, the old world clinging to its accumulated wealth, hording it for themselves in the face of the zombie attack — an all-devouring, e...

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Ballardian muxtape accompanying this post.

This will be the last post related to the CCCB’s J.G. Ballard exhibition for a while. Next week normal service will resume, including a slew of archival Ballard interviews and articles as well as some newly commissioned posts.

For the CCCB exhibition, I curated a selection of Ballardian inspired sound art and music: 46 tracks in all. I tried to cover everything: the early 80s postpunk era, when Ballard’s influence was at its zenith; the found-sound sound art that echoes themes of urban degradation in Ballard’s work; recent Ballardian stuff such as Burial and kode9; the mid-90s world music strain; title and incidental music from Ballard film and TV adaptations, including all the obscure productions; the late 90s indie homages … even JGB’s Desert Island Disc selections.
Reproduced below is the brief synopsis and the annotated playlist I wrote for the exhibition catalogue. I’ve also compiled a Muxtape to a...

From John Goff:
Myself and Dr. Shivdeep Grewal have organised a half-day conference with the title ‘J.G.Ballard: imaginary scientist’ that may be of interest to some of your site users. It is intended to be the first of a series of half-day conferences on ‘writers of wrathful science’ (others are Houellebecq, Burroughs, and Ernst Jünger). It is from 1 – 5 pm at Brunel University on 7th September, 2008. The website for further details is: thinklink.capcog.com.
Writers of ‘wrathful science’
If you are interested in crossovers between literature, science, and philosophy then you may be interested in this series of half-day conferences on ‘writers of wrathful science’ such as J.G. Ballard, Michel Houellebecq, William Burroughs, and Ernst Jünger.
First conference …
13:00 – 17:00 hours, 7th September 2008 at Brunel University, Fee: £10
J. G. Ballard: imaginary scientist
J. G. Ballard is a prominent chronicler of the near future.
He may also be thought of as an ‘imaginary scientist’.
This conference will focus on his role as a writer of ‘wrat...