Terminus

"Perhaps the ending state of the human race will resemble a well-run airport where no planes ever take off!"







(click pic: make big)

Quote: J.G. Ballard in conversation, 2003
Amazing night photography of abandoned terminal at San Francisco International Airport by 4Pizon.

Ooze Out and Away

Read two interviews, one with J.G. Ballard, one with David Cronenberg!

Both men were interviewed by Mark Dery for Rage Magazine in 1997 around the time Cronenberg´s vision of "Crash" hit the screens.


via boingboing

Ballard Beat Box

No, this is not the new Pet Shop Boys sleeve!

It´s taken from a funny and technically amazing viral ad-gimmick that turns you into a human beat-box. You can chose between four templates, upload your (or any) portrait and within a minute your avatar will perform some wicked things to your face.

Since we here at StellaVista Towers have no great entertainment value with a pot warmer on our heads, I tried to upload pictures of some iconic friends.
Both, Liberace and Warhol didn´t work that well. Once morphed by the progeam they looked like Thunderbird puppets. It´s amazing how exchangeable they look when their hair/wig is hidden by a hat.


Anyway, it was much more fun to use a J.G. Ballard picture and it worked surprisingly well. Click here to see and hear JG Ballard aka MC Crashbox putting a donk on it!

MC Crashbox

Well, it´s in b/w but the morphing program is very picky and it was impossible to find a usable colour portrait of the man.

Andy MC


Then I had the smashing idea to use a (fake) image of the Damien-Hirst-Diamond-Skull. But again, the program wouldn´t accept the picture. I tried to modify it several times, but it didn´t work. Too bad, it would have been such a great contribution to this great Hirst-bashing project. Thanks to Jocko for bringing this great Jimmy Cauty project to my attention.

Last try was a screenshot of Kraftwerk´s "Musique Non Stop", since I wanted to see how an early, literally beatboxing CGI would look make the transition.
Boing Boom Tshack

Below you can try your own thing. It´s mostly in German but I think that it is possible to navigate the site anyway. Enter your birthday and location and it will play the Kraftwerk-video. If you want to start your own creation, click on the bottom left "werde Beatologist".

Low Flying Aircraft

Swedish Director Solveig Nordlund added another J.G. Ballard adaption to the small number of Ballard-films in 2002. It took her 15 years to let her vision of a film version of "Low Flying Aircraft" become a reality. With the help of a Swedish-Portugese co-production deal, filmed in Portuegese it became "Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude"
Set in a perfectly fitting location in an abandoned holiday-resort on the Portugese coast, the seldom seen feature lengths film takes Ballards story on a different, yet very fitting route.


The eerie Ballard distopia tells a story of an empty world that suffers under massive numbers of deformed child births. What sounds like a standard sci-fi sujet ("Children of Men" almost stopped there) is turned on its head by Ballard revealing the disturbing truth about the mutated children.

Nordlund decided to shift the focus of the story on the pregnant female lead Judith Forester (played by hauntingly strong and beautiful Margarida Marinho), who is determined to give birth to her baby, no matter what the outcome might be.

"Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude" is currently shown at various festivals. The film has a fantastic setting and amazing production values, despite its relatively small budget. Shot in Portugese and only available locally without subtitles on DVD, it is deemed to remain relatively obscure.

The ever brilliant folks at Ballardian have conducted an interesting interview with Solveig Nordlund recently and wrote a nice write-up of her work. They also extracted three 10-minute excerpts of "Low Flying Aircraft" of which I posted the second part here.

Parts one and three are available here and here. Recommended!

Cars

"My guess is that the car will remain much in its present form for the next thirty years." (Quote by J.G. Ballard in "Drive", 1971)

Photos taken from Stockmopar

Grace Jones: A One Man Show

The one and only Grace Jones is rumoured to release a new album, produced by Sly & Robbie with the inviting title "Corporate Cannibalism".

Sadly this was supposed to have happened 2 years ago. But if you ever went to see Grace Jones in concert you know that she always liked to take her time. Sometimes she decided to go onstage when the majority of the audience had already gone home!
So, if it is coming out this year or in 2010...Grace is always worth it.

With this video I experiemented with the new service Omnisio which allows you to edit your own videos, or stuff you found on Youtube, into one consecutive playback!

For this I used the five parts of Grace´s legendary "A One Man Show". The whole thing clocks in at 43 minutes and features Grace performing her fantastic "Niteclubbing" material in her typical outfits and antics. It begins with her version of "Warm Leatherette", the sick hommage to J.G. Ballards great novel "Crash".

"I´m at the mall on a diet pill": B-52s Funplex-Video

The video for Funplex has just arrived and its almost suberversive. And fun!
Seeing Fred Schneider rolling around this fantasy mall on a Segway is just too funny and there is even another cameo of RuPaul.

It seems that the dreaded mall-culture is recently becoming the subject of artistic re-evaluation from spontaneous musical performances to dystopian novels about people who live in retail-land.

Leave it to the B-52s to cause a party riot in this dreary place. But "Hippie be quiet, your peace-sign t-shirt can cause a riot."

"...what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow......but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths."Quote from the introduction of the 1974 french edition of "Crash" by J.G. Ballard.
The "Mickey Mouse Gasmask" apparantly has its own history and is available in various designs since 1942.

"Seeing everything makes you sad"

Seems I have missed this last summer.

German newspaper "Die Welt" posted a new JG Ballard interview, titled "Terror als erotisch aufgeladene Perversion" (transl.: Terror as erotically charged perversion).
I must admit that reading "Die Welt" is not my priority as it is one of those German papers published by "Springer Press" (aka THE ENEMY!").
Anyway, despite being fairly short its a nice and compact take on Ballard´s view of things and offers more of his brilliant, to-the-point quotes on terror, modernism, Tony Blair and Shanghai.

He uses as well some of his older, often cited phrases, such as "the future will be...like a suburb of Düsseldorf."
The lovely people at Ballardian have re-translated the interview into english. Highly recommended!