April 2009
64 posts
Looking 4 something that will protect me from... →
Is ‘hoax advertising’ still advertising? Yes.
[via hipsterrunoff]
“Faulkner [the valet] came in after dinner, coughed, and said: ‘The light on the...”
–
Elizabeth Bowen (via shovingleopard)
100% DEAD! →
[via dbaker]
That St Petersburg now is among the finest towns...
“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral”
– Bertolt Brecht (via shovingleopard)
The inability of so many people (both Republicans... →
[via Glenn Greenwald in Salon]
“When Miss Prucanl and Mr. Clementi make love in a bed full of sugar,...”
– Just some of the burning philosophical questions that Sweet Movie managed to provoke at the NY Times
WatchJG Ballard’s CRASH! (1971)
via jomc via hauntedtapedeck via castle
“Is there life on the Earth?
Is there life after birth?
It’s a joy to be...”
– Sweet Movie
“Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?”
– William Archibald Spooner (via shovingleopard)
Ballard declared that the future will be boring.... →
[via Gipe] [via Granta]
“Knut Hamsun’s greatest novels throttle reason. In Hunger (1890), Mysteries...”
– [via James Wood in the LRB]
“I have returned there
where I had never been.
Nothing has changed...”
– Giorgio Caproni, The Last Homecoming
[via FPA Russia Blog via Svetlana Boym]
“I do not believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which man will...”
– Pier Paolo Pasolini
(via georgeolken)
“Consumerism itself is a vast desert. A desert without a single oasis as far as I...”
– ballardinterview (via Joanne McNeil at the Tomorrow Museum and jomc)
WatchEverything you need to know about Russia
[via The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel]
Russians worried by global crisis →
30% of those polled said a falling standard of living was the single biggest issue facing the country
60% of those polled also said they believed Putin will be President again in 2012
Combination of rising unemployment and rising prices could lead to unrest
Watch
Pulitzer Prize Suppressed by Every TV Network →
CNN ran an 898-word story on the various Pulitzer winners — describing virtually every winner — but was simply unable to find any space even to mention David Barstow’s name, let alone inform their readers that he won the Prize for uncovering core corruption at the heart of CNN’s coverage of the Iraq War and other military-related matters. No other major television news...
“Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives...”
– C. Wright Mills, qtd. in Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History. New York: Anchor Books, 2008. (via alexandrab)
“Many writers I meet approach the career of writing in the same way as, say,...”
– JG Ballard
“Too many writers, I feel, have read English literature at university, which...”
– JG Ballard [via Jason Cowley in Prospect Magazine]
Ballard and Post-Communism →
Ballard’s books are at least as important to understanding modern Russia and its psychology as any report from the Carnegie Russia Center.
“Mark Penn is the original Fail Whale”
– [via MrInBetween at Gawker]
[Mark Penn] = [Twitter Fail Whale]
What does it mean to be a foreigner living...
“I think it was, it was a nice gesture to give me a book. I’m a reader.”
– Obama responds to Chavez’s gift of The Open Veins of Latin America, by Galeano
“I embraced surrealism
like a lover.”
– JG Ballard
Ballard's Influence on Film →
It is a great irony that the film-maker who brought Ballard fame, and indeed fortune, was Steven Spielberg
“Ballard was a poet of the occult fear, the subliminal horror. His work explored...”
– via Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian