The Trash Project Does Little Atoms

 

I was recently given the opportunity by Neil Denny to appear on his show Little Atoms to not only talk about my latest book from Strange Attractor Press, Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash, but to discuss The Trash Project in its entirety. With Neil’s kind encouragement, I was able to go over the origins of Inferno, how it developed into the alchemic arcana of Purgatory and then ended with a protracted meditation on the relationship between sovereignty and waste in Paradise. There was also time to outline the complex generative relationship between The Trash Project and Dante’s three-part Divine Comedy. The result was a lively hour of conversation, which you can either download here as a podcast – or if, like me, you still think of radio as an event, a slightly shorter version of this episode of Little Atoms is being broadcast by Resonance 104.4 FM on Monday 13 January at 11.00. Feel free to listen in. And a Happy New Year to all my readers, to Resonance 104.4 FM and to everyone involved with Little Atoms.

 

Pictured above: obligatory packshots – The Trash Project, Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise and The Trash Concordance 

 

'Paradise' Launch at The Horse Hospital, Friday 6 December

 

On Friday 6 December, I'd be delighted if you could please join me and Strange Attractor Press in celebrating the completion of my monumental Trash Project with the publication launch for Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash at The Horse Hospital. The event will also celebrate twenty years since Strange Attractor’s first book event at this most blessed and favoured venue.

I will be reading from Paradise, alongside a performance from Howlround’s Robin The Fog on reel-to-reel tape recorders. You will of course know us better as The Howling.

Copies of all three volumes – Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise – will be on sale, along with their companion volume The Trash Concordance; and I will be signing copies of all four titles while stocks last.

‘Virtuosic in its scope…never less that compelling in its sheer erudition’ 

Chris Hill, Fortean Times

‘Energetic and enthusiastic, Hollings’ conception of trash is poetic, exaggerated and true to the conceptual and ultimately confrontational nature of the underground.’

Laura Jacobs, Art Monthly

In the third and final volume of his personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics, Ken Hollings tells 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.

 

Here are the details

December 6th
Doors 7pm
The Horse Hospital
Colonnade
London 

Free Entry

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)

'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!’