'Trash: An Autobiography' Is Now Available Online

 

 

 

I am very pleased to announce that the edition of Bad Punk broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM on Friday 10 July is now available on Mixcloud – and you can find it by clicking here.

 

The show went out live at 22.00 BST on a very hot night. There was nobody else in the studio apart from Johny Brown and me, and we had to switch the aircon off while we were broadcasting. It was a very special occasion, not just because of the heat and the sense of that Johny and I were the only ones in the studio late on a Friday night. It became a piece of live theatre. I was reading extracts from all the three volumes of The Trash Project – from Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise – and from essays that had previously appeared in Noon and émergent magazines, which will be included in the forthcoming Ken Hollings Reader from Strange Attractor Press. I also included drafts from my autobiography, a long-term writing project that is already producing some surprising and exciting material.

 

I am of course very grateful to Johny Brown for creating such a fabulous show around my reading of ‘Trash: An Autobiography’ parts one through three, and also most beholden to  Strange Attractor Press for publishing the Trash Project and to Noon and émergent for featuring my work. 

 

Anyone who attended my recent ‘Trash Trilogy’ lecture at the BFI will know what to expect from this show, and I hope you will enjoy it. Bad Movies on Bad Punk is a reality!

 

 

Bad Movies on ‘Bad Punk’: Ken Hollings on Resonance 104.4 FM with Johny Brown

 

I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining the fabulous Johny Brown and members of The Band of Holy Joy live on Friday 26 June for another episode of ‘Bad Punk’, a show Johny has been hosting for almost twenty-five years.

 

Last time I appeared on ‘Bad Punk’, it was with Howlround for a ninety-minute show devoted to our work together as The Howling, first broadcast in April 2025. For more details of that event, please click here.

 

This time around, it will just be me with a microphone and a script, plus Johny and The Band of Holy Joy dismantling the airspace around me in real time. 

 

I will be presenting ‘Trash: A Personal Education’, comprising extracts from the three volumes that make up my Trash Project, cut together with some new thoughts and autobiographical musings on the theme of bad movies and why they remain so fabulous. 

 

Trash has been an abiding passion of mine for some time now, and ‘Trash: A Personal Education’ will also contain snippets from essays I have written in the past for Noon and Emergent and are to be included in The Ken Hollings Reader, due out next year from Strange Attractor Press. Look out for more details on this in the coming weeks.

 

In the meantime, be prepared for 90 minutes of hypnogogic beauty and uneasy easy listening on Resonance 104.4, starting at 22.00, Friday 26 June. For that day’s complete schedule on the Resonance website, please click here. 

 

At a glance:

Ken Hollings ‘Trash: An Autobiography’

‘Bad Punk’ with Johny Brown and The Band of Holy Joy

22.00 – 23.30 

Friday 26 June 

Resonance 104.4 FM

STOP PRESS: Due to unforeseen circumstances, this show has been postponed until July 10 - look out for more details in a future post.

Pictured above: Bad Movies and Bad People go together –  KH, Maria Montez in Cobra Woman, El Santo, the Mutant from Metaluna, I Was A Teenage Frankenstein, She Devils on Wheels, Bronx Warriors

 

 

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 

 

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)

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

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.

‘The Golden Disc’ and The Concept of Exceptional Success

The German artist and author Olaf Arndt of the group BBM recently initiated an online revival of the radical German artzine Die Aktion. Originally founded in 1911, Die Aktion published writing by Heinrich Mann, Andre Gide Erwin Piscator and Hugo Ball among others before succumbing to hyperinflation and expiring in the early 1930s . The intentions behind this new online edition of Die Aktion are laid out in its editorial. 

I was very happy to be invited to contribute a new and exclusive piece of writing to Die Aktion 4.0. Olaf asked for something on Brexit and Covid-19 and I said: ‘Of course. Can I write about The Golden Disc?’ Olaf replied: ‘Of course. What is it?’ I explained that it was a 1958 teensploitation film set on the London coffee-bar scene and starring Terry Dene, the UK’s answer to Elvis Presley. I added that a close examination of the film’s complex pathology would give a clear analysis of where I think we are at the moment. Olaf said that sounded fine, and to please go ahead. 

The form, structure arrangement of the finished piece has been drawn directly from Walter Benjamin’s last essay, ‘On The Concept of History’, which you can find here. It also owes a great deal to Deleuze and Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus, the art of Richard Lindner and the rise in the local rose-ringed parakeet population of South West London. 

But mostly it is about The Golden Disc, which remains, for me at least, a shamefully overlooked B-movie masterpiece. 

My essay is called ‘On The Concept of Brexit, Covid and Exceptional Success: A Fable in Eighteen Parts with Two Addenda and Seven Supporting Quotations’. 

You can find it here. 

Thank you.

Flesh and Metal: Carel Capek's RUR turns 100

 

 

On 25 January 1921, at the National Theatre in Prague, the first performance of Rossum’s Universal Robots, or RUR, by the Bohemian playwright Carel Capek took place. In terms of pure theatre, his ‘comedy of science’, as he liked to call it, is fairly unremarkable – it had none of Meyerhold’s biomechanics, the abstract dynamism of Futurist sintesi or the geometric reduction of human form or motion found in Bauhaus theatre and theatre. But it did give the world a new word: ‘robot’.

 

Ever since I first wrote about RUR in my essay ‘Robot Power, Robot Pride’ for Strange Attractor Journal Two and in my book The Bright Labyrinth, I have wanted to do something more detailed on Capek’s play. The Samuel French edition of RUR published in 1923 described RUR as a ‘fantastic melodrama’ but it would be a struggle to call it science fiction. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are still a long way in the future. However, its impact upon the cultural imagination of the time was so deep that the word ‘robot’ continues to have a deep resonance today. 

 

The Robots Are Us is my attempt to explore why a word that barely existed in Czech at the time when Capek wrote RUR managed to capture the fears and desires of its times the way it did.  Capek’s robots were made of flesh and blood in giant factories – robots today are mostly silicone, plastic and metal alloys – some only exist as strings of code. Our collective anxieties over a possible robot rebellion remain, however. I was lucky to have people like Caroline Edwards, Roger Luckhurst, Danielle Picard and Dustin Abnet to discuss the play with me. I was even more fortunate to have Mark Burman as my producer. He and I have worked together many times before, most notably on last year’s essay series celebrating 2019 as The Year of Blade Runner . 

 

The programme goes out on Sunday at 18.45 GMT on BBC Radio 3 but will remain online afterwards. You can find the details and a link here.

‘Looks like metal…feels like flesh… Looks like flesh…feels like metal.’

 

Pictured above: an early Czech production of RUR and Eric, Britain’s homemade answer to RUR as reconstructed for the Science Museum’s Robots show in 2017

 

'Ekphrasis' on Touch Radio

At the start of 2018 the artist Richard Bevan asked me to participate in an exhibition of maquette at  The Block in New Cross, South East London. I old him I would take the request seriously. 'Don't overthink it,' Richard replied. 'Maquettes', he went on, should be taken as a broad term for something that exists between a thought and a thing. I had noticed an accidental arrangement of objects on a shelf in my studio and decided to submit these in response to Richard's invitation. Around the same time the editors of Satori magazine approached me to write something for a forthcoming issue on the subject of aesthetics.The result was 'Ekphrasis', a text that describes in detail the arrangement of objects on my studio shelf - I wrote it while preparing for the 'Maquettes' show to open at The Block. The show as very lovely, and I was very happy to have been included in it. I was also very happy with the way the 'Ekphrasis' text came out, so when Block invited me to give a reading there to mark the close of the exhibition, I agreed immediately. Richard Bevan recorded the reading, and Rachel Hollings - known as @lahollings to her many Instagram followers - photographed the event.

I am indebted to Rachel and Richard for their documentation of my reading.

Later in  the year Mike Harding of Touch Radio expressed an interest in featuring the recording of 'Ekphrasis' as one of their fabulous transmissions. You can access it directly from them by clicking here.

This is the first piece of mine in a long time to exist as a show a published text, a live performance and a sound piece. Single process: multiple outcomes. I wish I could do this more often, Enjoy.

Pictured above from top to bottom: KH's arrangement of objects at the Maquettes show, photographed by Richard Bevan; Satori 03, cover by Sam Copeland; KH reading, photographed by Rachel Hollings; KH and Richard Bevan at The Block, photographed by Rachel Hollings.

Right Between the Ears: Radio 3, June 2

My latest programme for BBC Radio 3, ‘Right Between the Ears’ is going out this Saturday evening (June 2) at 9.30 pm. If you already have other arrangements, you will still be able to stream the programme after the broadcast by clicking here.

This link also gives you additional information about the programme. A podcast version will also be available.

A few years ago, readers of this blog may recall, I underwent a routine eye operation while under the influence of a local anaesthetic, which numbed all sensation in my head. I now recall that operation only as an uninterrupted succession of sounds - heavy buzzes, high-pitched crackles, sizzles and trickles resonated inside his skull. It created a series of rippling acoustic spaces around me. The most amazing music I have ever heard was playing amid the flickering lights and snatches of gentle conversation in the theatre. What is more I could no longer tell with my deadened senses, what sounds were coming from within me and which from without. I seemed to be experiencing a much deeper, more physiological state of hearing.

In an attempt to recreate this 'amazing music', 'Right Between the Ears' takes the listener deep into the acoustic territory of the skull from the eyes to the ears and then the recesses of the skull itself. This experience, this haunting auditory space, has a long history: the Quetzalcoatl Indians of Central America rubbed a notched bone against a skull during their funeral rites. The poet Rilke once wondered what kind of ‘primal sound’ would emerge if you ran a phonograph needle across the sutures of the human skull: would a new incoherent voice resonate from within it? With the aid of sound artist Aura Satz, we performed Rilke’s experiment with an actual human skull in a daylight séance conducted around a West London kitchen table. 

There are some remarkable reconstructions of auditory experiences caused by the physiology of the ear and eye and the cavities of the human head. I even lay in the dark on the springy floor of the anechoic chamber at Salford University to hear the high-pitched keening of my nerves and the low murmuring croon of my blood circulating in search of my own primal sound.  

I am profoundly grateful to all of the contributors to this programme, which sounds amazing: the binaural mix making for a mesmerising listening experience. Do try it with headphones if you get the chance. Despite the subject matter, the actual programme has a relatively low ‘ik’ factor - but then my generation was the first to become desensitised towards violence. 

Guest voices include musician and composer Martin McCarrick, sound artist Aura Satz, Trevor Cox of Salford University, Sophie Scott of UCL and Louisa Wykham of Moorfields Eye Hospital. The man with the artificial head was Studio Manager Donald McDonald and the producer was Mark Burman. 

Pictured above: our kitchen table séance, outside the amazing Maida Vale studios, cables at old BH 

McLuhan, Mars and Me

This has happened entirely by chance, and I am sure that it the circumstances behind this phenomenon will never repeat themselves, but I find that I have two major features going out on the BBC within a week of each other.

The first was ‘A New Red World’ a literary exploration of Martian Utopias that was commissioned as part of Radio 4’s Martian Week. It went out on Tuesday March 7 at 11.00, which meant that I never got to hear the broadcast for myself. In amongst a number of interesting programmes, ‘Another Red World’ examined how Mars became the subject of intense speculation: was the Red Planet a cypher for humanity’s past or its future? Was it a dead or dying world – or did it offer the hope of new social and cultural orders? I found myself enjoying the Martian worldviews of Victorian curates, French psychics, American feminists and Russian revolutionaries. The programme ends with meditations from James Lovelock on the uselessness of terraforming Mars and from Kim Stanley Robinson on the colonising of Mars as a thought experiment. I may have started the programme with the confession that I want to be buried on Mars when I die; but it was a privilege to breathe the same planetary air as these people. The amazing sound design for the show was by Mark Burman who also produced my show about Forbidden Planet for Radio 3, which is still online.

To hear ‘A New Red World’, click here.

To download ‘A New Red World’ as a podcast, click

here.

The second programme is my long-anticipated Sunday Feature on Marshall McLuhan for BBC Radio 3. ‘Watcha Doin’, Marshall McLuhan’ is personal reflection on the life, career and theories of this important media theorist. It was recorded and scripted over the summer and early autumn of 2016 and includes some fascinating interviews with contemporary writers and academics, such as my old friends Tom McCarthy and Rathna Ramanathan, as well as number of McLuhan acolytes from the 1960s. There are still some surviving members of the ‘priesthood’ of students that seemed to have followed McLuhan the Catholic scholar around from the late 60s into the 70s and up to his death in 1980. This seemed like a vital time to record their impressions of, and reflections on, this remarkable mind. Most generous of all with their time and enthusiasm was the writer Tom Wolfe – while not a member of the inner circle, he probably brought more insight to his relationship with McLuhan than anyone else. Wolfe’s agent had told us firmly that the celebrated author was ‘only doing one interview in the UK and that was with Peter York for the Sunday Times.’ Fortunately my brilliant producer Dan Shepherd managed to track down Wolfe down to his summer home in Long Island. Wolfe was gracious in the extreme – answered all of our questions with his usual urbanity and even gave us the recipe for a perfect Tom Collins ‘although’, he added, ‘there’s only a few barmen old enough to know how to make is properly.’ I came to the end of the programme still loving McLuhan for all of his flaws and prejudices: his media fame was based upon a dense and interlocking series of misunderstandings – but then whose isn’t?

‘Watcha Doin’, Marshall McLuhan’ goes out on March 19 on Radio 3 at 18.45. You can find the details here.

Pictured above:

KH posing with the Curiosity Mars Rover at Imperial College London, April 2016; Mars circa 1875 by French illustrator Étienne Trouvelot; Marshall McLuhan and Professor Frank Kermode on BBC TV’s Monitor in January 24 1965; Tom Wolfe going all-out Global Village August 11 2016

The Cut-Up Method: ‘The End of the Civilized World’

As a follow-up to my recent documentary for Radio 4, ‘Cutting Up the Cut-Up’, I have been working with Dan Shepherd of Farshoreline Productions  on an online supplement: ‘Cutcast Up-Pod’, which is currently available from Soundcloud. When editing the original programme Dan and I quickly discovered that we had recorded far more material than we could comfortably fit into a show that was scheduled to come in just shy of half an hour. This is quite often the case when making a radio show for the BBC. In this case, however, we found that we had accumulated a lot of really fascinating material on the audio cut-up process – Vicki Bennett, Lenka Clayton, Cassetteboy and Armando Iannucci all went into great detail about what kinds of methods to follow, which machines work best and what kind of material it is best to start with. Vicki Bennett and Armando Iannucci shared a passion for local radio news , while Lenka Clayton and Casstetteboy both demonstrated a more systematic and painstaking approach to cutting up words.  Editing the four speakers together, with an absolute minimum of scripted links, offers insightful information to anyone interested in developing their own cut-up skills. As William Burroughs always liked to remind us: ‘any number can play.’

'Cutcast Up-pod' – featuring additional material from Chris Morris and Negativland – is available here.

A short piece on the cut-up method I wrote for BBC News Online – also with online examples from Negativland and Chris Morris – is available here.

RIP Don Joyce (1944-2015) – ‘….then I feel so bad.’

See also:

Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins and Minor Abrasions

William S Burroughs, Morphine, Cancer and Me