BBC Radio 3 Presents The Summer Sounds of Ken Hollings

More by chance than design, the programmers at BBC Radio have organized a Ken Hollings mini festival over the middle two weeks of August. Forget the Proms. Forget whatever might be happening in Edinburgh. BBC Radio 3 loves me, and I love BBC Radio 3. The programmes are all repeats, and each of them has been available online since they were originally broadcast; but there is still something special about having a scheduled appointment to hear something over the radio. 

 

The details are as follows:

 

On Sunday August 8 at 18.45, there is another chance to hear Rewiring Raymond Scott, my take on the life and career of this amazing early force in electronic music.  For ‘Fast Forward’, the recent audio doc series that Simon James created for Kasperky Labs, Scott was the biggest influence on approach to sound design and presentation. You can find a link to the show here.

 

Then on Monday August 9 at 22.45, they are beginning a repeat of my five-part Essay series On Holiday with Nietzsche. You can find out the details behind this series by clicking here. The link to the first episode, ‘Becoming What You Are’ can be found here.

 

On Tuesday August 10 at 22.45, you can hear ‘Under the Mountain’– the details are here.

 

On Wednesday August 11 at 22.45, you can hear ‘For Everyone and No One’ – the details are here.

 

On Thursday August 12 at 22.45, you can hear ‘A Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ – the details are here.

 

And on Friday August 13 at 22.45, you can hear the fifth and final part, ‘The Art of Ending’ – the details are here.

 

And finally on Wednesday August 18 at 22.00, BBC Radio 3 are repeating Right Between the Ears, a work for text and sound design created in binaural sound that explores my own personal experience of the human skull as a resonating chamber. For more details on the original concept, please click here. This one is definitely worth listening over headphones. The Radio 3 website details can be found here 

 

Radio is still a medium I love working with very much – it dates back to the time when I first started listening to talks and readings on Radio 3 as a teenager, discovering whole new worlds of sounds, experiences and ideas. I think the mind breathes deeper and better over the airwaves – even digital ones.

Catching up with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt

It was a rare privilege for me to speak last weekend about cold war media and technology from inside one of the most fabulous pieces of early Space Age design: the Haus der Kulturen. Formerly known as the Kongresshalle, designed by American architect Hugh Stubbins and a gift from the United States to the people of West Berlin, it was the ideological equivalent of a NATO airbase or missile range planted right next to the Wall that divided East from West – John F Kennedy spoke from here on his visit to Berlin in June 1963. To me, it did not matter in the least that those attending transmediale 13, whose proud theme was ‘Back When Pluto Was a Planet’, had voted not to reinstate the lonely planet’s status: within the negative spaces and projecting curves of the HdeKdeW’s interior Pluto was, so far I was concerned, definitely still a planet.

The most prominent ‘collapsing new building’ of the Cold War reconstruction of West Germany, its roof having caved in, resulting in one death and several injuries, thereby marking its place in pop culture history, it belongs in outer space and to a future that we may never see. In other words, it feels as if a piece of the 1964 New York World’s Fair had been broken off and relocated in the Tiergarten. Playwright Heiner Müller once remarked that the only real place in the world was the dividing line between East and West Germany – today it might well be the empty lawns and fountains outside the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. In the meantime Hugh Stubbins went on to design the Citicorp building in Manhattan; and it was in the lobby of this fine building with its array of payphones that the first 2600 hacker meetings took place on the first Tuesday of every month. Every wall on this planet has a story to tell.

Pictured above: KH in the sleet outside the Haus der Kulturen der Welt prior to the BWAPWAP panel (picture courtesy of Sunil Manghani – note Henry Moore’s Large Divided Oval: Butterfly in background); interior space; evening descending upon a flying saucer in the trees; daytime exterior views – exit in search of Pluto.

Ludwig II’s Venus Grotto

At the start of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, after the orgiastic dance sequence insisted upon by the Jockey Club for its first performance in Paris, we find the poet sickening of the sensual pleasures offered in Venusberg – resisting Venus’s charms he elects to return to the world of men. Far from the world of men, in the grounds of his palace at Linderhof, did King Ludwig II a subterranean pleasure dome decree – in the form of an underground cave of stalactites surmounting a small artificial lake. In fact everything about this chamber was artificial – conceived and designed between 1876 and 1877, the Venus Grotto is an immersive stage setting constructed from canvas, cement and steel – its coloured lights, some reflecting the exact shade of Capri’s famous Blue Grotto, were powered by a series of 24 dynamos. The grotto’s air temperature was kept at a manageable level by the furnaces built into the cave’s walls. Have I missed any of its wonders? Oh yeah, the golden half-shell boat and throne from which Ludwig could admire his underground realm of the senses – the ceramic garlands and the artificial waterfall – and the rugged limestone entrance that was also the work of artifice rather than nature.

The Venus Grotto is an early media device – not surprisingly its conception coincides precisely with Edison’s invention (one wants to ‘discovery’ of so fundamental a device) and also with the raising of Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. A cinematic experience before such a thing had coalesced around the moving image, the Venus Grotto is not a spectacle that King Ludwig was prepared to share: we note again the womb-like warmth and wetness of the grotto itself, his own refined sense of ‘spirituality’ as opposed to what he considered the grosser sensations of sensual love, and finally that highly suggestive vertical slit in the rocks through which he entered his pleasure chamber. It was perhaps an unconscious arrangement that allowed a man, whose own birth at Nymphenberg was witnessed by selected members of the Bavarian court, to ensure that the first-born really was the next king of Bavaria, to return to the womb in nobody’s company but his own.

Pictured above from top to bottom: the entrance to the Venus Grotto in the grounds of Linderhof, the main chamber; stalactites and garlands; another view of main chamber showing a little more detail of A Heckel’s mural depicting Tannhäuser in Venusberg; and a side grotto. Photographs by roving shutterbug Kitty Keen as KH was incapable at the time, having succumbed to a mild case of Stendahl Syndrome.

See also:

Psychopathia Esoterica

First Autumn Leaves at Linderhof

Catching Up With Motorway Crash Barriers

The kind of temporary structures created by and around automobiles provides some of the most fascinating forms of architecture, such as the canvas and steel city of trucks, engines, oil drums and plastic sheeting created around the pit area at the Santa Pod dragstrip. Last month I encountered an interesting form of temporary structure while on my way back from Santa Pod in the backseat of the gold Chrysler PT Cruiser that belongs to Roger and Izabel Burton of the Horse Hospital. As we approached the end of the motorway just outside of North London the car started to lurch and falter: warning lights started to came on, illuminating the dashboard. Roger managed to keep things functioning long enough to steer the car to a stop in a runoff area edged with a long concrete crash barrier. The sun had almost gone down and there was a cold wind blowing: we were going to get to know this crash barrier very well over the next two or three hours.

A repair service was due to be with us within 20 minutes, but until then the call centre handling the recovery also asked that we leave the car and stand behind the crash barrier as a safety precaution.

‘We’re not really going to do that, are we?’ Izabel asked from under her NHRA baseball cap, huddled in the passenger seat.

‘I don’t know,’ Roger replied. ‘I think we’re supposed to…but we can stay if you like. It’ll be Ken who gets it first if anything runs into us.’

‘Well, I vote we wait behind the crash barrier,’ I offered brightly. ‘Who’s with me?’

Standing together behind the concrete barrier on an isolated strip of concrete, being buffeted by the slipstreams of lorries, 4x4s and coaches as they came roaring down a three-lane motorway is a far stranger experience than you might at first imagine. The forces involved in the large vehicles travelling at speed are extremely disorienting. You begin to appreciate how much we take being mobile for granted – who ever stops unless they have to? To find yourself suddenly immobile and stranded while being passed by moving lines of traffic is also to find yourself in a mild state of shock. With the sun completely set it grew colder still: there is little warmth to be derived from the motorway lights, which seem to be much higher on their poles when seen from ground level, and the illumination they spread is bluer and less forgiving than when seen from the window of a speeding car.

Dark trees twitched overhead and the dazzling smeared lines of car headlights broke up the darkness. Across the motorway, separated from us by six lanes of traffic, was a small cluster of post-war apartment blocks: with the lights on in some of the living room windows it was possible to see the occupants moving around, their wall-mounted flatscreen TVs silently flaring and flickering behind them. If this didn’t already feel like a scene from a late 70s J G Ballard short story, the three of us were startled to hear what sounded like a gunshot and a woman’s scream coming from somewhere among the blocks. Both sounds were so distinct they had the sharpness of a hallucination: guns in real life rarely sound like the ones we hear in movies in TV shows – not that there was much we could do about it separated as we were from the buildings by six continuous streams of traffic.

Finally a mechanic pulled his van in behind the Cruiser. There was nothing he could do fix the car right there and then, but he said he would wait with us until a tow truck arrived, which would be about 40 minutes. It was also safe for us to get back into the car again. As we walking back towards the stricken Cruiser Izabel grabbed my arm and tugged me away from the white line dividing the motorway from the off-road area. ‘You can’t go that close to the line, Ken,’ she said. ‘You’ll get sucked in behind a passing lorry if you’re not careful.’ Her point was well made when a Megabus roared by leaving the car shaking and bouncing in its wake. We listened to whatever we could pick up on the Cruiser’s FM radio (who knew Donny Osmond was a DJ now?) until the tow truck finally arrived. Now there was a repair van, a stricken Cruiser and a tow truck all pulled in against the crash barrier in a small bleak oasis of stillness. With hydraulic gears, steel cables and the tow truck’s tilted platform, the Cruiser was slowly hauled up off the concrete: Izabel and watched the whole thing from the rear window in tow truck’s cab.

Something like an assemblage that was part machine, part animal and part human shelter, the scene being played out was perhaps one only its participants could appreciate fully. Everyone else was moving way too fast. It took a while to winch the gold car up onto the back of the truck but then we were roaring and juddering our way through the outskirts of North London. ‘See how close we were to London?’ Roger muttered as we came off the motorway about five minutes later. ‘Yeah, but just be thankful we didn’t break down around here,’ Izabel replied, indicating the complicated junction of ramps and roundabouts ahead of us. The ride through central London in the back of a tow truck, high above all the other cars and pedestrians, was fantastic.

Pictured above: Izabel Burton making her way towards truck’s cab as it prepares to winch up the Cruiser; two shots of the Cruiser mounting the back of the tow truck taken through the cab window; Cruiser and tow truck locked in a mechanical embrace – note the NHRA badge on the radiator grill.

Catching up with Chernobyl – in conversation with Tony White

Disasters, as Maurice Blanchot has observed, ruin everything while leaving everything unchanged. This Thursday April 26, I shall have the pleasure of pursuing this idea further in the company of noted author Tony White at the Freeword Centre as we discuss his latest published work, Dicky Star and the garden rule. A narrative irradiated by the media fallout from Chernobyl, Dicky Star and the garden rule is published by Forma Arts and Media to accompany Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) by artists Jane and Louise Wilson.

Commissioned by Forma to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) is a suite of large-scale photographic prints, depicting deserted interiors from the now almost entirely abandoned town of Pripyat, situated within the 30km wide Exclusion Zone. The richly textured images of former public spaces include a kindergarten, cinema and a swimming pool, all of which explicitly reveal years of decay and the hurried nature of their abandonment. Dicky Star and the garden rule follows young couple Laura Morris and her boyfriend Jeremy through the turbulent days at the end of April 1986 when the world’s worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the former Soviet Union. Tony White’s narrative reveals Jeremy and Laura's story in vivid daily chapters that follow the disaster’s impact in the UK, but are also each determined by their own quixotic puzzle: each daily chapter must be told using all of the answers to the Guardian Quick Crossword from that day in 1986.

The following is taken from the author’s afterword to the published text:

The story occupies the Chernobyl time-line, from 26 April 1986 when the accident occurred, until 7 May when reports of the true scale of the disaster were printed in UK newspapers following the Kremlin press conference of the previous day. Rather than work with Jane and Louise in Ukraine or to have drawn too heavily upon the unique interviews and testimonies that they have been collecting in the course of their own research, it seemed pertinent to explore, in a work of fiction, the same events from a UK perspective and using contemporary print media as my primary source.

A metaphor for this approach might be that of the scientific control. In an experiment – e.g. one designed to test the effects of a particular drug – the control is of course the experimental sample that remains untreated or subject only to some standard or pre-existing variable or attribute in contrast to, or to provide a point of comparison with the main, treated sample.

My own research draws on two main sources. Firstly, the Leeds Other Paper archive, which is held in the local and family history section of Leeds Central Library. LOP was an independent, alternative left-wing newspaper published between 1974 and 1994 in that city, where I lived during the period in question. Secondly, archive copies of the Guardian newspaper held in the British Library’s national newspaper collection at Colindale, London.

Alongside the LOP’s prior anti-nuclear content, its critical stance and its notable dissemination of accurate scientific information about risks posed by ‘the cloud’ (as the plume of Chernobyl fallout was popularly referred to at the time), and the Guardian’s own extensive coverage of the disaster, I was particularly drawn to the then broadsheet’s back pages, to Steve Bell’s memorable cartoons of radioactive sheep and to the two crosswords, especially the Quick Crossword which I had been fond of doing at the time.

Dicky Star and the garden rule
Freeword Centre
60 Farringdon Road
London, EC1R 3GA
26 April 2012
18:30 (Doors 18:00)

Forma is delighted to announce a launch event to celebrate the publication of a specially commissioned work of fiction by Tony White, author of the critically acclaimed novel Foxy-T (Faber and Faber). Tony White will read excerpts from the book and be joined in conversation with writer and broadcaster Ken Hollings. Followed by drinks reception. RSVP essential. Please email Divya Thaker on dt@forma.org.uk  or +44 (0)207 456 7820.

Chernobyl image found on The Atlantic website.

We’re Living In This World Now – Catching Up With Ground Zero

We were married at 3.30 in the afternoon on 13 October 2001, police surveillance helicopters circling overhead. We danced for part of the night and then caught our flight to New York the next morning. The departure lounge was almost empty; and they were only using plastic cutlery in all the bars, cafés and eating areas.
There were a lot of empty seats on the plane too.
Looking back, I can see that it was the blind faith we had in ourselves and in the plans we’d made during the summer that was now taking us to New York. We arrived at the UN Plaza Hotel around ten at night and asked a woman at reception if we could see the swimming pool up on the 39th floor, just so we could find it again early the next morning.
‘The pool is closed right now,’ the woman said, ‘but sure, you can go up and have a look around. Someone should still be there.’
All we could see at night as we walked through glass-walled corridors to the pool area were the lights of midtown Manhattan arranged all around us like a universe of stars. An attendant in a white T-shirt and blue overalls was swabbing down the tiles over on the far side of the swimming area, a flattened panorama of darkness and light stretching out behind him.
He looked up at us.
‘They said in reception it would be OK for us to look around.’
Trailing a long white cable through the water, a robot pool cleaner shaped like a small mechanical turtle was working its way across the bottom of the pool towards the deep end. The attendant smiled and leaned on his mop.
‘Sure, go right ahead,’ he said. ‘Heck of a view, isn’t it?’
He spread an arm to indicate the starry expanse behind him.
‘Incredible,’ we said.
The robot pool cleaner continued its journey beneath the silent blue water.
‘They’ll build ’em back up again, you know?’ the attendant suddenly said. ‘They’ll build ’em up again for sure.’
‘You mean…’
He nodded his head vigorously.
‘See that light?’ he said and pointed towards a white glow on the horizon, just beyond the office lights of midtown Manhattan. ‘They’re working there right now.’
Oh my god, my god.
‘They’ll build them again,’ he said. ‘Sure to.’
He sounded so certain of what he was saying that it was hard not to believe him. He might even have been right just then and that was what they were planning to do. But even so, all we knew was that we were married now and together, and it felt as though we were walking among the stars.

The above text is taken from ‘Everything Is Going Extremely Well’, a short story of mine that appeared in issue 6 of Succour Magazine – ‘The Future’. It is a pretty accurate account of what Rachel and I first encountered in Manhattan in October of 2001. The story actually ended there, so it doesn’t mention the anthrax scare that was taking up all the news headlines at the time or the plane that crashed near Rockaway Beach, or the dump trucks filled with sand and rubble at the end of practically every main street, or the armed state troopers, and the humvees parked up high on the sidewalks, or indeed the fire trucks that would come chasing down the avenues, lights flashing and flags flying – everyone would stop and cheer as one went by. The story also does not include – and not many accounts can do full justice to – what it was like to visit Ground Zero in the weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers. The area was cordoned off, but that didn’t stop a huge press of people from filling the side streets and open areas in the immediate vicinity. The air was dark and smelled of burning – you felt toxic just breathing it in – and everywhere there was this low murmuring of voices as if no one dared to speak too loudly. It felt like we were all crowded together in some vast open-air cathedral. Rachel and I hadn’t gone there with the intention of taking photographs, but in the end there was no other response left open to you but to do so. Confronted by so much sorry and despair and by your own sense of individual helplessness, there was at least some refuge in lifting a camera to your eye and clicking a button. The above are just a few of the pictures we took, and they pretty much capture both the feeling and the moment.

Catching Up With Karlheinz Stockhausen, New York and 9/11

The Reverend Sirs at the Hauntological Society blog have just posted the full transcript a text of mine, ‘Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Outer Universe and Me’, which details the story of how Stockhausen and I ended up being photographed together outside a mobile recording studio in the spring of 1999. Originally published in the catalogue for the 2002 Sydney Biennale, it links the two of us with the events of 9/11 through speculations on the future of space travel, a Kurdish street demonstration in Cologne and a missing copy of Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger. In reflecting on my reasons for writing this account the way I did in 2002, I found myself returning once again to the day in October 2001 when Rachel, the love of my life, and I got married: after a lot of thought we had decided to stick with our original plan of honeymooning in New York. Barely a month after the attack on the World Trade Centre, it was a very different city from the one we had visited the previous year and where we had first decided to become husband and wife. In a forthcoming post on this blog I hope to share with you some of the photographs we took of the crowds and barriers at Ground Zero during our stay. In the meantime here are two views of Manhattan in early October 2001, where the buildings and streets really did seem that empty: taken together, they tell their own story.

See also: A Memory for Stockhausen Day

Catching up with Dario Argento’s ‘Profondo Rosso’ in Turin

I have been so busily engaged in writing up my recent experiences with My Cat is An Alien in Turin for a forthcoming issue of The Wire that I have not had many opportunities to post some of the more amazing pictures documenting my stay with them. One of the places that Maurizio, Roberto and Ramona were particularly keen to show me was the Villa Scott, tucked away in the Torino Hills, on the other side of the Po from the main city centre. Fans of Dario Argento’s 1975 masterpiece Profondo Rosso will have no trouble recognizing in these gentle art-nouveau lines the setting for one of the defining incidents from this giallo tour de force. Actual locations for movie scenes have their own special architectural presence; they are haunted in a way that only those who have grown up with cinema can possibly understand and must always exist as a link between two worlds. In this case, the gates to the villa were firmly locked, and the entire place seemed to belong only to the late-afternoon shadows. However, my attempts to reach through the railings to photograph the main entrance provoked a growl from somewhere deep in the undergrowth, suggesting that, at the very least, a guard dog was lying in wait for any sign of trespass – and that’s at the very least. Needless to say I pulled my arms back in quite quickly

Pictured above: three views of Villa Scott by KH and three by Roberto Opalio – the last one in the series shows KH and Ramona Ponzini braving the guard dog outside the main gate in the name of cinema, architecture and extreme bloodshed.

Catching Up With Nietzsche In Turin

‘I arrived on the afternoon of the twenty-first in Turin, my proved place, my Residenz from now on. I took again the same accommodation I had occupied in the spring, via Carlo Alberto 6,III, opposite the mighty palazzo Carignano, in which Vittorio Emanuele was born, with a view of the piazza Carlo Alberto and beyond that the hills.’

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecco Homo

On the morning of January 3, 1889 Friedrich Nietzsche left his lodgings on the piazza Carlo Alberto. Accounts vary slightly on what precisely happened next, but within a few paces he encountered a cab driver beating his horse on or near the piazza Carignano, overlooked by the imposing Baroque facade of the palazzo Carignano. Nietzsche flung his arms around the horse’s neck to protect it, then collapsed to the ground unconscious. He was immediately carried back to his room on the piazza Carlo Alberto, returning along the little side street linking the two squares, again under the stern walls of the palazzo Carignano. When he finally regained consciousness he was no longer sane. Up until his death on August 25, 1900, he was never to be in his right mind again.

I was very moved to be conducted by Roberto and Maurizio Opalio and Ramona Pozzini to visit the spot where the tragic events of January 3 1889 took place. The distances involved seem pitifully small compared with the enormity of the mental breakdown suffered by Nietzsche that day. Even so, Roberto was kind enough to point out to me the window of Nietzsche’s room looking out onto the piazza Carlo Alberto, where I am happy to report that you can still catch a glimpse of the hills beyond.

Pictured above: the palazzo Carignano, bearing the name of Vittorio Emanuele II; the cobbled piazza Carignano and the side street leading to the piazza Carlo Alberto at the top left of the photograph; the side walls of the palazzo Carignano, Nietzsche’s last accommodation in Turin – his room is the one with the open window and the orange curtain, located on the second floor, second in from the left; looking back towards the side street leading to the piazza Carignano. As an unintended side-effect, the lurching zigzag motif suggested in the sequence of pictures above gives a sense of the collapse and distress associated with this part of Turin.

Catching Up With Santa Pod Raceway

Based around the runway of a former WWII airbase, the Santa Pod Raceway is a recurring architectural marvel made up of tents, trucks, marquees and trailers. Formerly part of Poddington Airbase, the drag strip becomes the focal point two or three times a year for FIA Top Fuel events featuring monstrous cars and even more monstrous engines. Burning up vicious chemicals like nitro-methane, a form of underwater explosive, and capable of hitting speeds over 300 mph, these mad desire machines are designed and built to do one thing extremely well: go as fast as possible in a straight line over a quarter mile in a matter of seconds. Effectively a road that leads nowhere, the drag strip becomes the focal point for a temporary city that comes alive with strange mechanical life forms during the course of a meeting. Unfortunately the recent Bank Holiday event was rained off – which meant that a lot of them never left the workshop. It’s been a couple of years since I last visited this earth-bound space station; and while the protracted rain made any form of racing impossible, it did give me a chance to photograph some of the pit area, where crews continued to work on and exhibit a range of top fuel funny cars, classic slingshot dragsters and wicked fuel-altereds in a makeshift historical gallery of human engineering.

Pictured above: tents, trucks and raingear; a top fuel engine being worked on in the pits; a fuel-altered dragster on display; a classic slingshot under canvas - with thanks to Izabel and Roger K Burton of the Horse Hospital for organizing the visit.

Catching Up With The Baunton UFO

The distinguishing feature of Unidentified Flying Objects is that they are – for better or worse – unidentified. An identified object tends to be one that can be easily categorized as something else: in other words in becoming identified it is transformed into a specific object, entity of phenomenon. A chair is, therefore, not an identified object – it’s a chair. The picture reproduced above was taken by roving shutterbug Kitty Keen, a regular photographic contributor to this blog, around 3.30 in the afternoon of April 20, 2011. She was walking in a field somewhere between Baunton and Cirencester in the Cotswolds and had actually stopped to capture a distant view of Cirencester Parish Church, whose square tower is a local landmark, which can be seen in the middle of the horizon on this picture. Quite what the spinning, vibrating object in the sky to its left might be is anybody’s guess. Miss Keen didn’t even notice it until we examined the picture together later that day. According to Mark ‘Mirage Men’ Pilkington, the object corresponds to a vintage type included in the 1952 NORAD UFO spotting chart: either a ‘winged cigar shape’ or ‘winged cylinder-shaped’, which narrows it down a bit. Those already familiar with Mark’s excellent book will appreciate that, as always, there is more to this than meets the eye. In the meantime Miss Keen would like to point out that she does not work for any government agency.

Note: this entry is being labelled as part of my occasional series of posts on architecture as objects and in the sky and church towers always tend to do strange things to the landscape.

Homage to Japan – Catching Up With the Fukushima State of Emergency

Illusions depend a great deal upon not being in full possession of the facts. To see the kaiju eiga genre as the obsession of a culture repeatedly rehearsing its unvoiced fears of nuclear obliteration or natural catastrophe is to explain little and to obscure a great deal more. It is also an attitude based upon a very selective view of Japan’s filmic output. For example, in the decade that witnessed the rise of Godzilla, films explicitly confronting Japan’s continuing nuclear nightmare, such as Kaneto’s Shindo’s Children of Hiroshima and Lucky Dragon No. 5, were also being released. Ishiro Honda himself had visited Hiroshima in 1946 and had wanted to convey in Gojira some of the horrors which he experienced there. Unfortunately, the film’s references to bomb shelters, Nagasaki and its pleas for nuclear disarmament were deleted from the English-language version by its American distributors. Godzilla, however, had already selected a very different target for himself. It was a disaster area still waiting to happen, and each time he returned to it, he became more a part of its future than its past.


By 1945, Allied air raids had reduced most of Tokyo to smoking embers. Its predominantly wooden buildings had burned easily, resulting in the destruction of three-quarters of a million houses and the deaths of 100,000 of the city’s inhabitants. A further three million were left homeless. Today, as well as being one of the principal centres of world economic activity, the greater Tokyo area also houses an astonishing 25% of Japan’s entire population. This vast urban sprawl has come to be regarded by many as the ultimate megalopolis: the first city of the 21st Century. The planners and engineers responsible for its safety have also described it as a ‘disaster amplification mechanism’: a term which could just as easily be applied to Godzilla himself.


There is, however, something both reassuring and unsettling about the Tokyo which Honda and Tsuburaya had Godzilla smash so repeatedly. It never changed. No matter how far into the future the films were set, Tokyo always returned looking the same. In a universe increasingly populated by alien invaders, female psychics, killer androids and giant mecha, Tokyo’s vast centre-less sprawl seemed to expand into time and space, eternally rising unchanged from its own rubble. The more Godzilla demolished it, the more it came back, determined to survive.

From Tokyo Must Be Destroyed: Dreams of Tall Buildings and Monsters, written after the Kobe Earthquake, 1995

Catching Up With The Balcony Below Room 16

It is hard to write a site report on ‘Off the Page’, which took place at Whistable, a small picturesque town on the Kent coast, over the weekend without mentioning one incident that was not related in any way to the festival but which has ended up overshadowing any recollection I may now have of it. And if that opening sentence sounds a little too much like the introduction to an M R James tale in which a guest at a hotel is troubled during the night by strange sounds coming from the room next door and then finds himself the next morning alone at breakfast, his nerves badly jangled, contemplating what actually happened, then I apologise; but that’s pretty much how it was. This series of posts has always been about the architecture of buildings I have recently visited: in it I try to treat them as if they were films or books or magazines that I have only just managed to catch up on. This post seems a little more immediate than that, however.

At around midnight of the first day of the festival, I left Jonny Trunk, Steve Beresford and Dave Tompkins chatting in the bar and went up to my room: I would have loved to stay in their company but was scheduled to give my talk on John Cage at 10.00 am the following morning so wanted to be rested for an early start. I cannot have been asleep for more than forty minutes before I heard a banging and scratching on my door. The following are the notes I wrote up immediately after what happened:

The guy woke me up about 1.00 am trying to force his way into my room - he’d mistaken the number – I was in 18 – turned out he was in 16 - like an idiot I actually opened the door and saw him off. He then started yelling at a woman who was already in his room: it was evident he was really drunk – he quietened down quickly though, kept up a steady stream of talk, rambling and very aggressive but as if his engine was about to run down. Then just before 2.00 he started getting very loud again and abusive towards the woman – by then she was crying and screaming and pleading. I couldn’t stand to hear that and do nothing so called down to the night manager – told him that things in the room next door were getting nasty. He came up, told the couple in room 16 that he’d called the police but I think it was a bluff at that stage – I heard him enter the room - the drunken man claimed he’d ‘just been asleep’ - things became extremely violent and heated after that - night manger badly beaten, out on the landing, making the most inhuman cries – sounded like the woman locked herself in bathroom, then came out again – the man throwing stuff around the room and swearing loudly – heavy violent banging against the wall – then a lot of very loud yelling and a window suddenly shattering - I thought it sounded as if he had thrown himself through it in a shower of broken glass – but later heard that he was pushed. I dialled emergency services on my mobile - it was about 2.20 am by then - said they should bring an ambulance and police - she said there was already a call logged in, but could I give them the correct address for the hotel, which I was able to do because I had the festival information pack on the bed next to me – even so, no one arrived before 3.00 - all that time the drunk is screaming ‘Ella! Ella! My leg’s hanging off I’m bleeding to death - call a fucking ambulance - anything’ – over and over again for a half hour – no choice but to sit in silence and listen, fingernails through the palms of my hands - then there were the voices of the ambulance crew on the balcony trying to lower him down to the street – they had to cut his trousers off his injured leg in order to reposition it – more screams and groans – the sound of broken glass being swept up – meanwhile a policewoman took Ella away – then a police patrol stopped by the room around 4.00 to check it over - and maybe I slept then for a little while or maybe I didn’t. I’m not sure.

I finally left my room around 8.00 am – saw the blood streaked down the door to room 16 and trailed across the landing carpet. Suddenly realized I had actually seen nothing but heard it all unfolding through the thin hotel walls. Went down to reception and asked after the night manager – the woman at reception had only arrived that morning so had no real idea of what had happened – she said he was badly beaten and still in hospital and that she had known him well and was very upset to hear what had happened to him. I mentioned the blood on the door and she said that it was still a crime scene - the forensic investigation van had just arrived - ash blonde woman with camera and sample cases. ‘Watch it or I’ll push you through the window,’ I heard one hotel staff member say to another. Saw Mark Fisher and his lovely wife Zoe in the corridor with their new baby ‘What? I didn’t hear anything,’ he said when I told him a little about what had happened. They were booked into a room on the other side of the building. ‘We were just worried about the baby crying and keeping everyone awake.’

Steve Beresford and Jonny Trunk were wandering around outside the hotel. What the hell happened? They’d both heard parts of the night’s events from their respective rooms. Most of the ‘Off the Page’ artists had been put up in the same hotel, so an account of the incident was slowly beginning to take shape. Green Gartside had seen the night manager after the assault, sitting downstairs, his face badly swollen. David Toop had been awoken by the breaking glass and the drunken fall.

‘He landed on the balcony next to mine,’ he exclaimed.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but he started out from the window next to mine.’

Pictured above: two views from my window of the balcony below Room 16 shortly after the police forensics officer had photographed it – note in the upper one the spare change that must have fallen from the drunken guy’s pockets when they cut his trousers off him.

Catching Up With Dounreay

‘Dounreay Experimental Reactor Establishment, on the northern shore of Scotland, embodies many of the contradictions and lost possibilities of the Atomic Age,’ Gair Dunlop reports on his fascinating new blog, Entropic Modernism. ‘Following initial introductions, and the award of a major grant from the now-departed Scottish Arts Council, I have been granted unprecedented access to the site, to former and current members of staff at all levels, and the nuclear visual archive at Harwell.’ Just starting up but dedicated to ‘joining a range of things together; explorations of semi-abandoned technology, contemporary art, film and visual thinking’, Gair’s explorations should prove essential reading over the coming weeks as the Dounreay core is slowly penetrated. When the music stops, run like blazes.

Pictured above: Dounreay in all its glory, courtesy of Utility Week, surmounted by two images taken with thanks to Gair Dunlop from Entropic Modernism.

Catching Up With Coniston Water

Listening to the low murmur of voices on and around Coniston Water, all of them talking about Donald Campbell’s fatal here crash in January 1967, you suddenly realize that the Bluebird is still back-flipping its way across the lake, sending out ripples that can be felt even this far into the future, when both speedboat and body have been retrieved from the lake and consigned to their respective resting places. A phantom architecture comes into being here that links JG Ballard with Arthur Ransome and John Ruskin, both of whom are linked with buildings on the opposite shore from the empty and fenced-in Bluebird Café.

Pictured above: The Bluebird Café, closed for renovations; the stretch of water where the crash took place; a memorial to Donald Campbell CBE.

Featured below: footage of the crash posted on YouTube (try watching the clip with the sound off for the most lasting effect)