Ken Hollings, The Howling and Howloween at Margate Caves

 

I am very excited to announce a very special site-specific show taking place at Margate Caves on Thursday 31 October. Thanks to Seadog Books, I am happy to announce Howloween, an evening of clammy weirdness and strange darkness that none of you should even dream of missing. You can find more details and order tickets by clicking here.

 

As part of Howloween, I will be giving the first public reading ever from Paradise, my latest book for Strange Attractor Press, on a suitably subterranean theme: namely, the fabulous Venus Grotto of King Ludwig II. Seadog Books will be selling copies of Paradise at the Caves, along with complete sets of The Trash Project for all you completists, and I will also on hand to sign copies. 

 

My reading will be followed by the premiere of ‘Be Quiet In This Church’, the latest live performance by The Howling. This is an ambitious project inspired by a bizarre series of texts posted as comments under a YouTube video, where they were discovered by Robin The Fog. Either produced by a chatbot or in response to a homework assignment, the texts offer a set of grammatical permutations on the same remarkably similar sentences. Who wrote them or how they ended up as comments posted under an old music infomercial remain a mystery. We decided not to alter or edit the texts in any way but simply arrange them for five speaking voices. The result is a fractured meditation on repetition and variation in which every sentence is transformed into a haunting subterranean experience. The performance will feature the additional voices of Claire Breach, Xanthe Horner, Hamzah Aldimi and Martyna Wielgopolan, to whom The Howling would like publicly to express their gratitude.

 

Some of the BQITC crew visited Margate Caves during the summer to experiment with voices and acoustics to see what would work in this cavernous space. Xanthe also brought her gong, which will be featured in the 31 October performance. You can see from the pictures above that we will be performing in a fabulous set of vaulted spaces that was once an old chalk mine. Due to the size and capacity of Margate Caves, there is a strictly limited audience capacity, and we are already down to the last twenty tickets. If you’re in the Margate area or in the mood for a Halloween excursion, this may be exactly what you are looking for.

 

Pictured above:

Two views of the Margate Caves interior

Xanthe, Claire and Robin reacting to some of the Cave Paintings

More Cave Paintings

Xanthe + gong

Robin + cassette recorder

Paradise + back cover

Ludwig II of Bavaria: The Movie King

 

I was recently invited by Adam Alston, the editor of Staging Decadence, to contribute an essay to this remarkable online platform. I was told that it could be about anything I wanted. This gave me a welcome opportunity to write about a subject that has interested me for quite a while. The movies made in the twentieth century on the life of King Ludwig II of Bavaria have long fascinated me. Ludwig is a major presence in my latest book, Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash, which is the third and concluding part of my Trash Project. Ludwig II is a supreme example of aesthetic sovereignty attained through spectacular extravagance and waste: the castles that proved to be his ruin are magnificent Baroque follies stranded in time towards the end of the nineteenth century. He had these fairytale dream palaces built at a time when modernism was already making its first technological incursions into contemporary society and culture. 

 

Although frequently photographed during his reign, Ludwig did not live long enough to appear in even the earliest moving pictures. This means that he never personally encountered what would become the modernist artform.  However, it didn’t take long for an emergent movie industry to start portraying Ludwig’s colourful life. The first surviving film depicting scenes from his life appeared in 1920, released with an early Tarzan movie from Hollywood. Another silent movie from 1930 met with official disapproval. Later in the century came Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s low-budget masterpiece Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King, first released in 1972. This was the same year in which Luchino Visconti released his lavish retelling of the king’s life in Ludwig, starring Helmut Berger in the title role. 

 

I had wanted to write more about Ludwig as a modern cinematic obsession in Paradise, but the very strict ordering of the text, determined by the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy, meant that I had to set this intriguing theme aside for another day. Well, another day has finally come, and you can find my essay ‘Projected Fairy Tales: The Life of Ludwig II of Bavaria as Revealed in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by clicking here.

 

To coincide with the posting online of this new essay, I have been informed by the wonderful Lady Liminal, AKA Rebecca Lambert, that Sky History has recently shown a film documentary on the death of Ludwig II, which features extracts from an extensive filmed interview I gave on the subject some years ago. Rebecca tells me that the doc can also be found on Amazon Prime if you know where to look. The film was part of a series on Royal Murder Mysteries, so you can only imagine.

 

There will be other events and occurrences to celebrate the launch of Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash in the coming weeks, and I will be posted advance information on social media in due course. To order an advance copy, please click here.

 

Pictured above

Ludwig II posing for the court photographer (Joseph Albert)

Neuschwanstein’s inner courtyard (Rachel Hollings)

Inside The Venus Grotto at Linderhof (Rachel Hollings)

KH wearing black on TV for Ludwig II (Rebecca Lambert)