So Long, Noon - I'm Writing for After Noon now!

 

I have some wonderful news for all you culture freaks out there. After a brief absence following the Covid pandemic, Noon is back – glossier, more relevant and more ‘post-everything’ than ever. Except now it’s called After Noon, and has recalibrated itself for the end of 2025 by going back to issue 01

 

When Jasmine Raznahan told me she was launching After Noon, I immediately agreed to contribute something. I like working with her very much and was very happy to contribute to issue 01 as I have been a regular contributor to Noon since Jasmine first invited me to write something for issue 2 back in 2014. In fact, I have contributed something to every issue right up to the magazine’s recent post-Covid hiatus. While writing for the magazine, I developed a very strong sense of what Jasmine wanted from me, especially for the ‘theme’ issues. I was aware that she was looking for texts that would complement the visual content of the magazine but would also take the reader off on some interesting and unusual tangents. 

 

It usually takes Jasmine and I one conversation to come up with the right tangent. She told me that the theme was ‘Borders’. And my immediate response was to write about New York in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The memory of this event had started haunting me again: Donald Trump was in the White House ordering airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites. Back then he had been boasting that the destruction of the World Trade Centre meant he now had the tallest building in New York – spoiler alert: he didn’t, and he never had. I was actually in Manhattan in the middle of October 2001 with my bride Rachel. As newlyweds, we had always planned to honeymoon there and were determined not to change our plans, despite the terrible tragedy that had just unfolded. What Rachel and I encountered there still surprises me to this day. 

 

I have always tried to make every text I wrote for Noon as different from the others as I possibly could. Jasmine has always given me the space and the opportunity to experiment with new ideas and approaches. It’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited to be working with her magazine again. ‘The Safest Place on Earth’ is different from a lot of my previous writing in that it is highly personal – I have rarely used the first person in my previous work, but I’m finding that autobiographical and autoethnographic writings are increasingly useful instruments for probing whatever the hell it is that’s happening to us today. One thing is clear to me, however: at some point, every writer worthy of the title owes their readers a life – and I’m trying to pay back some of that debt right now. 

 

The After Noon 01 launch took place last week at Claire de Rouen, a chic little bookshop in London’s East End. You knew it was chic because someone had dumped one high-heeled shoe and an empty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the trash. 

 

Buy yourself a little happy with After Noon (01) – and check out some Noon back issues by clicking here.

 

Dazed digital currently has a feature on the reincarnation of Noon as After Noon, and you can read it by clicking here.

 

Pictured above:

After Noon 01 cover – Katherine Hamnett by Juergen Teller

After Noon 01 cover detail

After Noon trash at Claire de Rouen

After Noon spine

Dazed screengrab

KH flashing ‘The Safest Place on Earth’ at Claire de Rouen (pix by Max King)

‘The Safest Place on Earth’ detail

 

 

Paul Verhoeven’s American Futures on BBC Radio 4

I’ve spent a lot of the past few months working on an hour-long programme for BBC Radio Four’s Archive on 4 slot on the subject of Paul Verhoeven and the three science-fiction movies he made in America at the end of the twentieth century: Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. Taken together, this loose triptych of grim fantasies lays out a disturbing archaeology of the future. Seen from the perspective of today, these movies offer startling insights into the hyperreality of the world we now encounter on a daily basis.

 

My producer and I were fortunate enough to interview some of the writers that worked with Verhoeven on these movies, notably Ed Neumeier, Michael Miner, Gary Goldman and Ron Shusset. We also managed to have a word with producer Jon Davidson and actor Kurtwood Smith, who brought a certain gleeful nastiness to his depiction of Clarence Boddicker in Robocop – I will never forget him delivering during the course of our interview such classic lines as ‘Can you fly, Bobby?’ and ‘Just give me my fucking phone call’. It really gave me the chills.

 

Over the summer we also had the opportunity to visit Paul Verhoeven and his wife Martine at their home in Holland. They were very gracious and hospitable; and we spent a wonderful afternoon with them, chatting about movies and comic books. I also recorded about two and half hours of an interview with Paul, extracts from which are featured in the show for Archive on 4. There were some amazing moments, especially when he spoke about his experiences as a child during WWII, his early movie experiences and his obsession with the life and death of Jesus. I’d been preparing a long time for this interview, pulling together details and references from Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. At the end of the afternoon, Martine, who’d known Paul since they first met in high school at the age of 17, said that I had been quoting Verhoeven ‘the way Paulus quotes Jesus.’ So Martine definitely had the last word on that.

 

For those of you unfamiliar with Verhoeven’s work, here are some details on the films featured in my programme.

 

Released in 1987, Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop brings an outsider’s eye to post-industrial, premillennial America. It’s no accident that the film is set in Detroit, once of the beating heart of the US automobile industry, but a city already dying on its feet as the factories shut down and their workforce migrated to the suburbs. The central character may be a cyborg cop, brutally gunned down by a street gang and then reassembled using advanced technology, but the film’s real focus is the shift in economics during the late 1980s away from manufacturing and towards purely monetarist strategies. The company responsible for this, ‘Omni Products Corporation’, represents the rise of outsourcing and the privatising of public concerns (healthcare army, urban development space exploration…). ‘Good business is where you find it,’ corporate predator Dick Jones boasts. ‘Hell, we practically are the military.’ The fact that it takes a creature that is half-human and half-machine to police it all is a message that was not lost on the people of Detroit, who have been agitated to have a statue of Robocop raised in their city for over a decade now.

 

Based on a short story by science-fiction legend Philip K Dick, ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’, Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) goes deep into corporate control of perceived ‘reality’, anticipating the ‘post-truth’ gaslighting of the Trump era and the rise of media controlled ‘smart cities’. 

 

Starship Troopers (1997) is also based on the work of a major West Coast science-fiction writer, Robert Heinlein. Its bugs-versus-teen-soap-stars narrative is the opportunity for a biting, deadpan satire on authoritarianism and its impact upon individual lives – a perspective that seems all the more relevant in the current political climate. Behind its depictions of media propaganda and military discipline is a movie that Daniel Ellsberg considered one of the most politically interesting films of the 1990s

 

There is also a wider narrative linking all three of these movies, and this is specific to the decades in which they were made. Each, in their own way, registers the first tremors of premillennial anxiety concerning the future, as ‘postmodern’ society prepared to leave one century and enter another. Using a palette that embraced comic-book violence, noir plotting, bloody violence and science-fiction imagery, Verhoeven and his scriptwriters managed to paint a shocking but thought-provoking picture of what was to come in the twenty-first century. 

 

Paul Verhoeven’s American Futures goes out on Saturday September 24 at 20.00 BST and is repeated in a slightly shorter version at noon on Friday September 30. It can also be accessed via BBC Sounds – for more information click here.

 

You have twenty seconds to comply…

 

Pictured above: Paul Verhoeven and KH gaze into each other’s eyes as if they are in love; Paul and Martine Verhoeven at home; Paul Verhoeven making love to the camera

Kurtwood Smith as Clarence Boddicker says you can keep the gum 

 

 

On Holiday With Nietzsche

My five-part series of essays on Friedrich Nietzsche starts this Monday night on BBC Radio 3 at 22.45. It’s a mix of travel writing and personal reflection that takes you from Turin to the Austrian Alps and the Norwegian fjords to the Italian Lakes. Nietzsche was a restless traveller throughout his life, never staying long in any one place, so his writings have always seemed like perfect holiday reading to me. Each of my essays sets a different book in a specific landscape, exploring the sights and sounds of that idle time in summer when you have the time to read and travel and explore.

The series will run across the entire week from May 6 to May 10 with a new reading every night, with each essay starting at 22.45. I do hope you will be able to join me.

Here is the schedule:

‘Becoming What You Are’: Monday May 6

‘Under the Mountain’: Tuesday May 7

‘For Everyone and No One’: Wednesday May 8

‘A Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’: Thursday May 9

‘The Art of Ending’: Friday May 10

For more details please click here. You can also follow ‘On Holiday With Nietzsche’ on the Radio 3 website following the initial transmission of each essay, and a podcast version will also be available from the same site.

Pictured above: Stalking Nietzsche with a Notebook and Pen – KH captured in various locations by @lahollings

‘In Praise of Wrathful Deities’ in Satori Issue 2

But wait…there’s more! I have a third new piece of writing in the second issue of Satori, a beautiful and still very young magazine that is really worthy of your support. It is wonderful to find my work presented in a publication dedicated to the proposition that ‘When you see death, things change.’ Too often we are encouraged either to look away from death or to treat it as a wholly negative and destructive force in our lives. Sometimes to contemplate life in terms of its sudden disruption can be a positive and liberating experience – as I know only too well. My essay ‘In Praise of Wrathful Deities’, looks at traditional Tibetan burial customs, the book of the dead as a literary genre, angry gods and the experience of reality. Along the way we encounter Aldous Huxley, Tim Leary and Thomas Mann, and I also include some of the night thoughts and journal entries I wrote down in my notebooks while recovering in the cancer ward at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital – still one of the most extraordinarily joyful periods of my entire life. 

Satori is on sale now and you can find out more about the issue and where to buy it by clicking here. The magazine’s publishers, Duncan Woods and Seb Camilleri, have this to say about their latest issue:

Issue two of SATORI – The Issue of Change, features over 100 pages of original content from acclaimed writers including Pico Iyer, Anita Moorjani, BJ Miller, Jill Bolte Taylor and Ken Hollings and an amazing selection of art and photography from Sara Sandri, Adam Goodison, Daniel Castro Garcia, Phil Hewitt and Tommaso Sartori to name but a few.

So go buy it – and help make sure that there’s an issue three.

Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics

I have an essay in a new collection of essays published by Edinburgh University Press. Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics is edited by Winchester School of Arts's Professor Ryan Bishop and Professor John Beck of the University of Westminster. The book connects Cold War material and conceptual technologies to 21st century arts, society and culture. From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, the contributors to this book shows that we live in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War.

I am particularly pleased with this collection, not just because it includes contributions from the likes of Ryan Bishop, Jussi Parrika and Neal White, but because it contains the very last essay to appear in print that was composed while I was still undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer back in the summer of 2014.  The drugs they were giving me at the time had a strange way of enhancing my powers of concentration, meaning that whatever I wrote under their influence remains special to me. There is still some material from a larger project to be published at some point, but that can wait for the moment. In the meantime, here is the abstract for the essay, plus some key words to get you started:

‘The Very Form Of Perverse Artificial Societies…’

The Unstable Emergence of the Network Family From its Cold War Nuclear Bunker

Abstract

Just as the ‘nuclear family’ was seen as a strategic element in the Cold War, dispersed into suburban enclaves of self-contained domestic units, so the ‘network family’ of today, distributed across social media now finds itself defined as a strategic element in a warring online community. This paper seeks to examine the shift in domestic security from its deep roots in the nuclear family under threat of nuclear destruction to the network family of today whose elusive and fragmented presence is experienced as both a threat and a defence position. Delueze and Guattari’s ‘desiring-machines’ are examined in terms of the impact Norbert Wiener’s theory of Cybernetics upon both popular culture and the theoretical models proposed by Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Marcuse. Even as the mass media communicate today’s moral panics over online security, antisocial ‘trolling’ and whistle blowers – which already seem a quaint piece of media archaeology – actions are depicted and explained in terms of a domestic instability, first perceived during the Cold War 1950s and 1960s, from ‘slacker’ Ed Snowden to Anonymous adolescent hackers and Julian Assange’s displaced national status.

Key Words

Cybernetics, networks, ‘desiring-machines’, science fiction, media archaeology, Cold War politics, defence strategies, suburbia, Hollywood, popular culture, war machines, hacker collectives, portable devices, interactivity, marginalization, Watergate, Anonymous, Wikileaks, Oedipus, ‘Molecular Revolution’

And here are some more details about Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics from the Edinburgh University Press:

Key Features

Makes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies, as they relate to the arts, society and culture

Draws on theorists such as Paul Virilio, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, Bernard Stiegler, Peter Sloterdijk and Carl Schmitt

The contributors include leading humanities and critical military studies scholars, and practising artists, writers, curators and broadcasters

234mm x 156mm

320 pages

20 colour illustration(s)

Technicities

ISBN

Hardback: 9781474409483

eBook (PDF): 9781474409490

eBook (ePub): 9781474409506

Website, Instagram, Twitter

It has been way too long since I posted anything on this blog - not because I have lost interest in the medium but because I have simply been too busy doing things to report back on  them. This blog was always intended as a substitute for my woefully dated website, which now has the appearance of a strange prehistoric insect that has been inadvertently preserved in amber by some casual hand. The site is currently being updated and should be online sometime soon, but the process has taken far longer than I had anticipated. In the meantime I have recently started a Hollingsville account on Instagram and will continue to post on this blog and on my @Hollingsville Twitter timeline. 

My health has continued to improve over the past year, and I find myself busier than ever. Once again my sincere apologies for the protracted silence on this blog. To make up for it here are some graffiti skulls and some other details  I photographed recently in Leake Street. It ain't Hollingsville, that's for sure, but it felt like home. 

Alive and Well and Walking on Mars

I have been making return trips to hospital over the past couple of months for routine tests and examinations. These including a follow-up colonoscopy a year on from my surgery for bowel cancer and a CT scan plus tumour marker tests six months after I completed my course of chemotherapy. I am happy to inform you that Mistress C seems to have packed her bags and ended our affair for the moment. I feel now as if we barely brushed against each other, although I am also aware that from this point on she will never be that far away from me.

Shortly after receiving this news I had the opportunity to travel up to Stevenage with the artist Aleksandra Mir to spend an afternoon at Airbus Defence and Space looking at their facilities and learning about their latest projects. This was part of some research Aleksandra and I are currently engaged upon – more of which will be revealed as events unfold.

Security at ADS is pretty tight: we had to provide proof of identity, agree beforehand not to take cameras with us and to refrain from using any social media while on the premises. Having been issued with special passes, we were shown by our host around the assembly and integration areas, the workshops and clean rooms where satellites are manufactured and painstakingly put together. We saw the thermal shield for a solar orbiter designed to keep extreme levels of heat away from delicate instruments that need to be kept at room temperature while passing closer to the sun than any other probe before. Few people will ever get to see the back of this shield, but Aleksandra and I are now among that small number. We also peeked in on fuel tanks milled out of solid blocks of titanium (welded ones could not stand the stresses involved in leaving earth’s gravity well), quartz manufacturing rooms and space blanket sewing workshops, all connected by long bright regular corridors that took my breath away.

The high point of our entire visit, however, was undoubtedly the ‘Mars Yard’, a large self-contained room with its own control room where they are replicating a stretch of Martian terrain for a new lander. Dubbed ‘ExoMars’, it is designed to navigate around the surface of the Red Planet using visual recognition software and stereoscopic cameras mounted at the front of the rig. Instead of travelling centimetres at a time, like previous rovers, because it constantly requires new coordinates on where to move to next, this one will be able to follow more general instructions – such as ‘head for that rock over there – then it will be left to make its own way there. In order to develop the software required for this system to work, the whole of Mars Yard is designed to replicate as accurately as possible the visual conditions as well as the immediate surface and terrain of Mars. There is a life-size photographic panorama of the Martian landscape taken from a previous lander, plus a wide expanse of sand studded with rocks, boulders and outcrops.  The rover stood over in the far corner ‘resting’ while we were there. People cannot be in the room when it is switched on, as their presence will only confuse its sensors – the whole space is painted a neutral shade of ochre so no sudden changes of colour can distract it. The overhead lights are set to replicate lighting conditions on Mars, and the sand has been specially selected as well.

It was like a large stage set waiting for a movie to happen – and then it did. ‘Would you like to take some photos?’ our host asked. Aleksandra and I were both genuinely surprised by this as we had been specifically requested not to bring cameras. ‘Is that really all right?’ Aleksandra asked. We were assured that it was okay.  I said I had one on my phone. ‘You can also walk out onto the surface of Mars if you like,’ the guide said. I could not believe what I was hearing. ‘Ken should go first,’ Aleksandra offered. ‘He’s always wanted to walk on Mars.’ I thought this was really a gracious gesture from the First Woman on The Moon. This is a proud moment, I murmured as I stepped out onto the sandy topsoil and walked across the surface of Mars. I turned, and Aleksandra took a couple of pictures – the sand was really loose and yielded easily under your feet, worse than beach sand. Soon I stepped back down again and photographed Aleksandra conquering her first planet and pointing towards the ExoMars rover in the far corner.

I really cannot express how thrilling the moment was – our host even took a photograph of the two of us together on Mars.  From experiencing a hospital cancer ward as a space station to walking on Mars seems to have taken less than a step, and yet I also find myself millions of miles from where I was a year ago. I could not have imagined this happening back then. As Aleksandra and I returned along the length of Mars Yard we noticed a red admiral butterfly lying dead on the guardrail – it seemed entirely appropriate somehow. No summer lasts forever – but this had been a great moment.

Pictured above: KH on Mars photographed by Aleksandra Mir – note the ExoMars rover at the far right of the Mars Yard.

While I Was Sleeping…

Just recently my old friend Aleksandra Mir gently reprimanded me for not updating this blog since I posted the first details of my illness back in February. She is, of course, absolutely right; and I must apologise sincerely to anyone outside of my usual Twitter and email circle for not keeping them informed of what has been going on. I knew that I would return to a different network when I left hospital, but I had no idea it would be one from which I would absent myself for such a long period of time. There are a number of reasons for this, and I will list some of them here by way of an explanation and an update.

While the surgery was successful in cleanly removing the tumour that was growing inside me, it took a long time to adjust to life outside the hospital again. The six or so days I spent in there had a deeper impact on me than I had realized at the time. To me if felt as though I were inhabiting a huge space station: an impression that was only strengthened at night when you heard the entire building humming and respiring and regulating itself. The photographs included with this post – taken as always by the Daily Planet’s roving shutterbug Kitty Keen – are from the day before I was released from hospital and also document the first time I had taken any steps outside the ward since my surgery. They say more about my state of mind when going back into the world than anything else I could write here. One friend characterized the pictures instantly with the comment: ‘At last – the missing outtakes from Tarkovsy’s Solaris.’

The period of recovery from the surgery was the only thing I could actually describe as progress, but as this involved going for long daily walks, catching up on email correspondence and getting back to work on my writing and other activities, it left little time for posting further details online. I kept the Twitter account updated, but I got too interested in what everyone else was doing to mention much about my own condition.  I will be posting links and details of some of things I have been up to over the recuperation period during what remains of the summer in an effort to update this blog as thoroughly as possible.

Once I was deemed fit enough to withstand it I was put on a six-month course of fairly brutal chemotherapy, which I will also describe in more detail in a later post. At this stage it is enough to note that living with anti-cancer drugs is like living with Vodou spirits inhabiting your body on a daily basis – they come and go as they please, and you tend to do what they tell you to. You are also prone to long periods of fatigue and spiritual lassitude (no god rides a human for free – this much I know is true) and you have to learn to work around them. Again writing and immediate daily concerns took precedent over posting online details about what was happening. The other problem with chemotherapy is that there is no sense of the ‘progress’ I had blithely assumed I would be able to describe once I emerged from hospital. Chemotherapy is basically a banquet of poisons – it never makes you feel ‘better’ in the way that one assumes normal medicine might do. On the contrary, you deal with side effects and physiological uprisings, sudden flare-ups and moments of pure stoned abandonment – they are still drugs, after all, whichever way you look at them. And how do you describe that in terms of ‘progress’? I am asking this question while about to start my seventh cycle of treatment out of eight and looking forward to an end to this particular feast.

The last – and probably most important – reason for taking so long in posting something was that I was completely unprepared for all of the messages of support, offers to visit and the emails containing good wishes and good thoughts for the future. Aside from the time and effort it took to reply to them, they also produced within me a certain reticence. I now realize that, for all the talk of ‘pathological oversharing’ taking place within social networks, I still perceive the network itself as being essentially formal in its manner of operation – it relies upon protocols and agreements and codes in order to function effectively. Part of me still has a fond attachment to the early days of the otaku when it was about trading information among formal strangers more than anything else. I perceive this severe sense of formality as functioning like a hypersensitive nervous system – it retracts and shrinks away from certain forms of attention, however welcome they might actually be to the recipient.

In other words, I am profoundly grateful to the vast majority of those who took the trouble to contact me since my February 3 blog post; it meant so much to me that it nearly dislodged me from my own network. But then I did say that things might change, didn’t I?

How to Wreck the Internet: I Have Cancer

I have not been posting much on this blog recently because frankly I have not had the energy – I had been suffering in the latter part of 2013 from a creeping anemia which was not really responding to conventional treatment. Turns out I have been hemorrhaging internally from a non-benign tumor in my colon – in other words I have been diagnosed with bowel cancer. As a result I have been spending a lot of time in hospital having CT scans, blood tests and talking to specialists – I now feel like an earth-based astronaut exploring medical space through passages and corridors that lead from scanners to operating theatres to drip feeds and epidurals.  Fortunately my condition has been caught at a relatively early stage when it is still contained and can be safely removed via keyhole surgery. I am going into theatre tomorrow – and yes it does feel like a piece of performance art.

I have informed most of the people with whom I have immediate contact over the past ten days or so, but I have not really been sure how well news like this locates itself on the internet – the physiological reality of my condition does not seem to be something that could possibly withstand the process of being communicated via the network. There remains, however, the obligation to communicate what is happening to me to those outside my immediate circle – I am not ashamed or afraid of my condition but am slightly unnerved at letting the people who still look in on my blog or follow me on Twitter know about it. Either my cancer will fail to communicate itself via the Internet or it will wreck my personal network by its presence. Will every statement I make from this point on be seen only in the light of this diagnosis? Do you retweet it? If so, to whom? Can you favourite it? Or would you even want to? Can any statement I make after this mean anything other than a slight rewording of the simple declaration that I have cancer? In the end I guess that is up to those who follow me (or choose not to for completely understandable reasons) to decide. Either way, they deserve at least that declaration.

For those who know my work and concerns, I should point out that I am not dead yet and that plans for Strange Attractor Press to go ahead with the publication of my newest book The Bright Labyrinth are already in place – my thanks to the excellent design and editorial team who are helping to move things forward. Similarly, work on my spoken-word audiocassette release for Tapeworm, announced on The Wire website recently, is also continuing. Please watch out for further announcements on these in the coming weeks. I am going to be hospitalized for about a week and then will be convalescing for most – if not all – of February. I will, however, be back – giving updates on my condition, offering my thoughts on what is happening around me and generally staying in touch with the world. I am not going away – but I may come back to a slightly different network from the one I left. In the meantime I wish whoever is reading this good health, peace and happiness – never have they seemed more important to me than right now.

Pictured above: KH exploring medical space, January 2014, photo by the Daily Planet’s roving shutterbug Kitty Keen