JG Ballard and David Cronenberg interviewed by Mark Dery

Mark Dery has posted his 1997 interviews with two of my favorite creators of weird fiction: science fiction author JG Ballard and filmmaker David Cronenberg. Of course, Cronenberg was the director who brought Ballard's deeply disturbing novel Crash to the big screen. (That same year, I also had fun interviewing Cronenberg for the print bOING bOING, but all we talked about were the squishy oozy sounds he likes to use in his movies.) Dery archived his PDFs of the interviews on Scribd and provided background on his blog.

JG Ballard interview
David Cronenberg interview
"Always Crashing in the Same Car" on Dery's blog

• [gretagretchen]

  The art direction looks like subpar Raygun to me.

• [M. Dery]

  “What was Rage?”

  From my blog post:

  “…the almost indescribable Rage, a mind-clenching blend of Adbusters-style anti-consumerist polemics; X-rated cartoons of eye-gouging awfulness (both in humor and execution), calculated to set the functionally illiterate aroar; political journalism; and, incalculably, softcore porn—accompanied, in some ill-conceived attempt at “culture jamming,” by captions that sneered at the silicone-injected models in the photos and snarked at the reader for oggling them (a strategy sure to increase the magazine’s market share). Did I mention that the magazine’s design was so groaningly amateurish it would have given Tibor Kalman an irritable bowel?

  Of course Rage was published by Larry Flynt.”

• [teufelsdroch]

  Did no one else celebrate when they found these interviews? Hooray!

  What was Rage? By this issue–Cronenberg, Ballard, original fiction, soft S&M cover–it looks like something I’d subscribe to.