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)

'Paradise' is Here - And It's Brought a Friend

I’m very happy to announce that Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash, the third volume of my journey into the domains of trash culture and trash aesthetics, is available now Strange Attractor Press.This volume completes a trilogy of works that began with the publication of Inferno: A Genealogy of 1960s Trash Culture back in 2019, and continued with Purgatory: Towards The Decay Of Meaning in 2022. 

Customers who buy the book directly from Strange Attractor Press will also receive a complimentary copy of The Trash Concordance: A Guide to The Divine Comedy, The Trash Project, Dante and Me. And you can find that offer by clicking here. 

Here’s a quick overview of Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash taken from the back of the book: 

In the third and final volume of his personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics, Ken Hollings tell the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the ‘King of Pop,’ all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure – even after the money was gone. In his reworking of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious but tragic self-indulgence

 If you’re new to The Trash Project, Strange Attractor are happy to offer, for a limited time only, the complete set of works at a discounted price of £45.00 plus P+P. Check out their webstore here while stocks last. This will bag you all four books, ie the three main titles, plus The Trash Concordance, a fully-illustrated limited edition bonus volume that maps connections between the Trash Project and its structural inspiration, Dante's Divine Comedy. 

The bundle includes: 

 - Inferno: A Genealogy of 1960s Trash Culture (2019) 

 - Purgatory: Towards The Decay Of Meaning (2022) 

 - Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash (2024) 

- The Trash Concordance: A Guide to the Divine Comedy, The Trash Project, Dante and Me (2024)

 The whole of The Trash Project has been beautifully designed by Tihana Sara assisted by Baphorock on Paradise and The Trash Concordance.

There will be some very special launch events coming up in the autumn, so look out for these - announcements will made in all the usual places on social media. 

 The long journey is nearly over - the end is in sight. 

Paradise

The Psychoanalysis of Trash 

by Ken Hollings 

 £17.99 

 ISBN: 9781913689858 

 352 pp. | 130x 182mm 

 35 illustrations 

 Pack shots above by Rachel Hollings

‘Let Me Die A Monster’ vs. ‘Die, Monster, Die!’ in New BFI Blu-Ray Release

In the spring of 2023, Strange Attractor Journal 5 was launched with a big event at Camden Art Centre. The most recent edition in this anthology series, it contained the full text of an unrealised screenplay I had written with David McGillivray back in 1997. The movie was to be called Let Me Die a Monster, and the opportunity to present a staged reading from it in public was too good to miss. David and I selected a couple of representative scenes and recruited some performers to read the key parts. The performance was very well received by a capacity audience. The action of Let Me Die a Monster takes place in the dying brain of Hollywood actor Nick Adams, who took his own life through a drug overdose. Nick Adams had been friends with James Dean and Elvis Presley; and there were also rumours that he’d had an affair with at least one of them. Adams was also one of a small number of Hollywood actors in the 1960s who went to Japan to make monster movies. He had the unique distinction of appearing opposite Godzilla in the 1965 kaiju epic Monster Zero (AKA Invasion of Astro Monster). The premise of Let Me Die a Monster is that, while dying, Adams imagines he's filming one last monster movie in Japan and has hallucinatory flashbacks to his time with James Dean and Elvis Presley. There’s an alien invasion going on as well, but that’s another story for another time. Meanwhile the British Film Institute had been preparing a Blu-Ray release of another Nick Adams movie that had come out the same year as Monster Zero – the British-made Die, Monster Die! in which he headlines with Boris Karloff. 

Vic Pratt of the BFI wanted to know if David and I could re-stage one of the scenes we had presented at the Camden Art Centre launch event for inclusion as extra on the Blu-Ray of Die, Monster Die! We said we’d love to, and David quickly contacted Iain Stirland, who’d played Nick Adams in our reading, and Daryl Crick, who’d been our Elvis. After a couple of rehearsals, we were ready to film the scene, which we did in a secret location, more familiarly known to a select few as the kitchen in David’s house. Sarah Appleton worked and camera and the sound, Vic Pratt documented the whole thing, while I read the stage directions. David and I were filmed talking to-camera about Let Me Die a Monster and discussing Die, Monster Die! and the strange appeal of the Nick Adams story.

I am pleased to announce that the BFI Blu-Ray of Die, Monster Die! is now available for purchase, and you can find it right here. It is loaded with all sorts of extra goodies, and I feel very pleased and proud to find myself in such fabulous company. Die, Monster Die! makes the perfect companion to the script of Let Me Die A Monster as it appears in Strange Attractor 5, so consider your life incomplete without either of them. Available wherever you go to get your weird on. Thank you.

Pictured Above

Die, Monster Die! cover art for the BFI Blu-Ray release

Nick Adams (Iain Stirland) stops Elvis (Daryl Crick) from choking

KH during shooting

David McGillivray smiling wickedly

Sarah Appleton in action

David McGillivray holding a copy of Strange Attractor Journal 5 and KH with a vintage VHS of Die, Monster Die!

The Howling Release Digital EP via The Tapeworm, Complete With Video

 

Just when you thought it was safe to back into the Spook House for the Late-Night Monster Show, The Howling return with our latest two-track EP. This digital release offers radical new takes on two tracks taken from our recent Wormhole album Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway. 

 

Track A is a video version of ‘The Skydivers’, The Howling’s deadpan exposition on a spectacularly lacklustre movie melodrama, backed by the throbbing of a customised street rod engine. Combining the original studio version of the track with visuals specially prepared for a recent live performance, ‘The Skydivers’ offers all the highs and lows of this moody soap opera in which people either fall in love or throw themselves out of planes. The Howling would like to acknowledge with grateful thanks the expert role played by our Executive Producer Lori E Allen in the final stages of preparing this video for release.

 

 Track B is a pounding live version of another track taken from The Howling’s Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway release. ‘The Picture of A Picture of Dorian Gray’ pays tribute to a 1970s Italian soft-core porn adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel. Using keywords scraped from the IMDB entry for the movie, The Howling reconstructs Wilde’s narrative as a fragmented sequence of plot points, themes and images. This recording was made in the teeth of severe technical problems at the Horse Hospital in London on 3 November 2023 and turned out to be greatly enhanced by them. This live version also includes a spoken-word introduction written by me for live performances of the piece but not featured on the album version.

‘The Skydivers’ video c/w ‘A Picture of the Picture of Dorian Gray’, live at the Horse Hospital is out now from The Tapeworm and can be found here. 

 

Described in The Wire as ‘the missing link between John Cage and Suicide’, The Howling is a collaborative project I started with sound artist Howlround devoted exclusively to their shared love of text, audiotape and trash.

 

We have presented work at Iklectic and the British Film Institute; and our track ‘David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’ was prominently featured in the Loewe SS24 catwalk show during Paris Fashion Week. We’re still not sure why.

 

The Howling – ‘The First Name in Excitement!’

 

The Howling Hits Paris Fashion Week in September – Spooks the Horse Hospital in November

 

Friday 29 September 2023 was the official release date for The Howling’s latest album Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway – brought to you on CD by Tapeworm subsidiary Wormhole. 

 

On the same day the fabulous house of Loewe unveiled their SS24 women’s wear collection as part of Paris Fashion Week. For reasons that still elude me, Loewe included in their runway show extracts from The Howling’s ‘David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’, which had been available since the start of September as a digital single release as a teaser for Incredible Night Creatures. The sight of so many models moving so elegantly to our work is one that will probably haunt me to my grave. If you want to share the experience, either check out the embedded video above or click here  – either way, it’s a moment to behold.

 

The track has long been a firm favourite at Howling performances; but Howlround and I had no idea its fame had extended quite that far. If you want to find out for yourself what Loewe got so excited about, The Howling are performing at The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury on Friday 3 November, when our good friend Travis Elborough is hosting ‘Bonfire of the BASF’, a sonic séance. Also on the bill are the fabulous Ruth Beyer talking to Caroline Wise about her ectoplasmic photography and Kemper Norton, back from the deepest deeps. You can find details and book tickets by clicking here. Howlround and I will be performing material from Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway, including ‘David Gest Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’. So come early, come clean...and do please dress correctly.

 

The Tapeworm and Through the Looking Glasses present…

‘Bonfire of the BASF’ as part of MEMOREX – an evening of misremembering at

The Horse Hospital, London WC1

Friday 3.11.23

Doors 19.00

Tickets £10.00 available from the Horse Hospital website

 

New From The Howling: Incredible Night Creatures of The Midway!

 

Incredible Night Creatures of The Midway is the latest album from The Howling, the collaborative project that Howlround and I started back in 2019, inspired by our deep love of Text, Tape and Trash. Available on CD or as a digital download, Incredible Night Creatures of The Midway is intense collision of spoken word and analogue tape effects splattered across five tracks that provide the missing link between John Cage and Suicide. It’s the all-singing, all dancing follow-up to our debut album All Hail Mega Force, hailed by The Wire as a ‘mesmeric disorientation’ when released by Tapeworm in 2022.

 

Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway celebrates some of The Howling’s favourite exploitation movies. ‘Contents Warning’ pays tribute to the quantities of sex, horror and violence to be found in the genre as a whole, while ‘David Gest, Liza Minelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’ is a Trash favourite from our live performances and is currently available as digital single. Each of the remaining three tracks is devoted to a specific movie dear to our hearts. ‘The Skydivers’ is a deadpan exposition of a spectacularly lacklustre 1960s soap opera set on a California airfield, backed by the throbbing of a customised street rod engine. ‘The Picture of A Picture of Dorian Gray’ is a pounding response to a 1970s Italian soft-core porn adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel. Finally, Howlround and I are joined by Beth Arzy of Jetstream Pony and composer/performer Ela Orleans for ‘Miss Frost Miss Leslie Miss Frost’, an exacting dismemberment of Miss Leslie’s Dolls, a creepy Florida-based slasher flick rumoured to have been produced with money smuggled out of Castro’s Cuba. We dare you to play it in the dark!

 

You can pre-order Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway direct from Tapeworm by clicking here. Copies will be shipped on September 29. Order it from Tapeworm, and you also get The Howling Wormzine as a downloadable PDF containing full versions of all the texts from the album. 

 

‘David Gest, Lisa Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’ is available right now as a digital single – find it simply by clicking here.

 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

 

The Howling will be doing a special performance based on material from the album at Iklectik Lab on September 19 as part of Vox Interruptus. For more details of the event and to book tickets, click here. Copies of Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway will be available for purchase on the night.

 

The Howling – ‘The First Name in Excitement!’

 

Pictured above: Mind-bending artwork for the album, the digital single and The Howling Wormzine by the amazing Stefan Fahler.

Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway front cover

‘David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth’ digital single 

Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway back cover 

Utopia, the 1964 New York World’s Fair and The Dialectics of Oblivion

 

To mark the launch of the recent release, Utopia or Oblivion (CN5) Constructive Music have created a website ‘which will serve as a focal point for a series of essays, articles, artists work and information resources that will be derived from the same broad remit offered to the musicians’ who have contributed to the project, inspired by the writings of R Buckminster Fuller.

 

Their website announcement continues:

 

‘Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. Humanity is in a final exam as to whether or not it might qualify for continuance in the Universe.’ (Utopia Or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity R. Buckminster Fuller) Constructive are pleased to announce a compilation of work by 10 artists inspired by and in response to the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, specifically from the essays Utopia Or Oblivion first published in 1963.

 

In response to their request, I have written an essay on the theme on Utopia and the Dialectics of Oblivion, inspired by the 1964 New York World’s Fair. This global event, better known for the US corporations drawn to it rather the nation states it sought to represent, has always fascinated me. It opened the same year that Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and McLuhan’s Understanding Media were published. It was also the year that Jonny Quest and Bewitched first appeared on American TV. ‘The Trip that’s Worth the Trip’ is a tribute to this unique moment in the history of progress. It is another in my series of occasional essays that take their structure directly from Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’.  I follow the same numbering and divisions of his original text and retain all of the extracted quotes with which he begins and ends some of the sections. I also try and keep the relative length of each entry to approximately the same proportions as those used by Benjamin, even though the overall length of the text itself might vary. I first used this approach in the essay ‘On The Concept of History, Brexit, Covid and the Paradise of Sovereignty: A fable in eighteen parts with two addenda and seven supporting quotations’ - which you can find in its entirety here. 

 

You can find The Trip That’s Worth the Trip: Utopia – the Dialectics of Oblivion on the Constructive website by clicking here.  

 

The Constructive album release details are as follows: CN5 Various Artists Utopia or Oblivion 2023 LP / DL

 

Pictured above:

The Pop Up New York World’s Fair

The General Motors Futurama pavilion

Jonny Quest gets his jetpack

From the Bewitched opening animation sequence