TH - The JG Ballard connection?

[mucephei]

Anyone else noticed that there's some striking imagery from JG Ballard stories in TH?

The video for RFTD had shots of abandoned buildings, the drained swimming pool, dazzling sun and blasted landscapes, and the photography on the inside cover of the LP backs this up with more abandoned technology, parched fields and a vista of desolation? All of these - particularly the swimming pool - are motifs in Ballard's fiction. Another is the nuclear war imagery.

I wonder if the Sandisons are JGB fans - it certainly seems to be the case from this album.

[Broken_Drum]

Definitely getting a similar vibe. Especially from his disaster trilogy and works like High-Rise, Concrete Island and Hello America. Some of the imagery from The Atrocity Exhibition (the billboards, the decrepit beaches, forgotten motorways) is incredibly similar aesthetically.

[Snufkin]

Anyone else noticed that there's some striking imagery from JG Ballard stories in TH?

The video for RFTD had shots of abandoned buildings, the drained swimming pool, dazzling sun and blasted landscapes, and the photography on the inside cover of the LP backs this up with more abandoned technology, parched fields and a vista of desolation? All of these - particularly the swimming pool - are motifs in Ballard's fiction. Another is the nuclear war imagery.

I wonder if the Sandisons are JGB fans - it certainly seems to be the case from this album.

Ballard was the first name to jump into my mind at the sight of that abandonned swimming pool in the RTFD video, too. But apparantly the brothers had little to do with the direction of the video?

Either way, who can say re JGB connection. But I think we'd be far from surprised to find out that they might be appreciators of Ballard.

[b0qurant]

Wouldn't have thought of this without your instigation, but yeah, definitely!

I picked up this massive collection of his short stories (I think it's a full collection) on a whim because it was cheap during the Border's closing (chain book store went bankrupt and basically gave shit away)

It's one of my favorites now.

[circleofthesun]

I've only read Kingdom Come, and it reminds me of something or other by Hantasi or Quarantine by Laurel Halo

How is the rest of his fiction?

[Snufkin]

I've only read Kingdom Come, and it reminds me of something or other by Hantasi or Quarantine by Laurel Halo

How is the rest of his fiction?

Kingdom Come is one of the weaker (though, I would say, still insightful and relevant). I highly rate Ballard and would recommend Crash and the Atrocity Exhibition above all others; mainly Crash

[Lens Larque]

I return to Myths of the Near Future and The Overloaded Man--both great shorts.

[mucephei]

The story The Terminal Beach is my favourite - very powerful.

[jcnporter]

How is the rest of his fiction?

Immense.

His short story collections would be a good start. Of his novels, Concrete Island and High Rise are my personal favourites.

Great thread. Tomorrow's Harvest does seem very Ballardian and of course there have been connections made between Ballard and 80s synth music before - see http://www.ballardian.com/ballard-on-synth-britannia and more recently the whole hauntology and psychogeography thing.

[jcnporter]

There's another connection between BOC and Ballard that I personally see in that they are (were) both artists that live(d) fairly ordinary and unpretentious lives while creating their art. Ballard lived in the same suburban London family house for decades right up until his death.
There's an integrity there that I'm very much drawn to in many of the artists that I appreciate.

[Broken_Drum]

http://www.ballardian.com/ballard-on-synth-britannia

I remember a great piece on the same site about a connection between Ballard and Burial and Kode 9's tracks - the whole abandoned city sound.

[mucephei]

There's another connection between BOC and Ballard that I personally see in that they are (were) both artists that live(d) fairly ordinary and unpretentious lives while creating their art. Ballard lived in the same suburban London family house for decades right up until his death.
There's an integrity there that I'm very much drawn to in many of the artists that I appreciate.

This.


I find it ironic, though, that for a writer who inspired many musicians, he did not listen to music himself.

[zeoevil]

I return to Myths of the Near Future and The Overloaded Man--both great shorts.

The Overloaded Man. I Overflow Man.

Huh.

[wash]

I return to Myths of the Near Future and The Overloaded Man--both great shorts.

The Overloaded Man. I Overflow Man.

Huh.

EDIT: can't find the actual story, but here's a brief supnopsis:

"Ballard was publishing short stories, and in one of the earliest, "The Overloaded Man" (1960), he prefigures the most recent forms of his imaginings and provides us with a précis for the underlying content of them all. In this story he shows quite explicitly that the source, or at least one crucial source, of the central problem of all his fiction is the historical dichotomy between subject and object, a dichotomy which he perceives as becoming catastrophic as bourgeois society itself disintegrates. In "The Overloaded Man" it is explicitly the lone petty bourgeois intellectual who destroys the entire world not by bombing it with nuclear weapons or too many people but by withdrawing himself from it. The protagonist's solipsism is equated with suicide, murder, and global catastrophe. In short, "The Overloaded Man" is a paradigm for Ballard's artistic opus."

this could very well be relevant to the apocalyptic themes of Tomorrow's Harvest.