{"id":104,"date":"2009-04-19T15:45:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-19T15:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthewlangley.com\/blog\/?p=104"},"modified":"2009-04-19T15:45:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-19T15:45:00","slug":"jg-ballard-has-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/?p=104","title":{"rendered":"JG Ballard has died."},"content":{"rendered":"

I guess no one else thinks today should be a holiday. Ballard was known for a few novels by the mainstream press, Empire of the Sun<\/i> was probably the most famous.<\/p>\n

For me, he changed the way I think and look at the everyday world around me. I read three novels of his back-to-back-to-back and radically changed what I made as art and how I thought about art, sex and our political system. Those books were; High-Rise<\/a><\/i>, Crash<\/a><\/i>, and Concrete Island<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t that these books were shocking in an accusatory way, it was that they were so matter of fact in a “this is how it’s going to be sort of way” – problem was, they were mostly dead on accurate.<\/p>\n

Martin Amis wrote: “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader’s brain.” The trouble is, after reading and thinking about the work – those parts of the brain start to get used. To great effect, I have rarely met someone who has read Ballard and has not struck me as someone I should know better.<\/p>\n

In Simulacra and Simulation<\/a><\/i>, Jean Baudrillard hailed Crash as the first great novel of the universe of simulation. That praise alone should send you either running towards or running away from JG Ballards writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I guess no one else thinks today should be a holiday. Ballard was known for a few novels by the mainstream press, Empire of the Sun was probably the most famous. For me, he changed the way I think and look at the everyday world around me. I read three novels of his back-to-back-to-back and radically changed what I made as art and how I thought about art, sex and our political system. Those books were; High-Rise, Crash, and Concrete Island. It wasn’t that these books were shocking in an accusatory way, it was that they were so matter of…<\/p>\n

Continue readingJG Ballard has died.<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[136],"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewlangley.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}