The Ruins Launch with The Howling for London Design Week

There is going to be a very special launch event on Saturday September 20 as part of this year’s London Design Festival. Illustrator Matthew Frame and I have been collaborating on The Ruins, an elegant stand-alone publication that combines his sharply inked panoramic images with some of my sharply inked panoramic writing. Matt’s subject is 1950s dystopian sci-fi movies, drawing upon scenes from the likes of The Time Machine and This Island Earth. My text, written at his request in response to Matt’s illustrations, is a section-by-section reworking of Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ considered from the perspective of Beyond the Time Barrier, a 1960 B-movie involving a US jet pilot who finds himself in the divided future of...2024. It is the latest in a short series of reworkings I have undertaken of this key Benjamin essay, which was only published after his death by suicide. The book has been beautifully designed and laid out by Patrick Fry and is absolutely gorgeous. It is being published in a limited edition by Jaune Press, so get them while you can. 

 

The Howling will be performing. Matthew Frame will be speaking. There will also be a chance to play videogames and to experience ‘Paradise’, an amazing site-specific installation by the sculptor Max King.  

And there will, of course, be you.

 

Here are the details:

 

Where – Free Play City, 199 Eade Road, Harringay Warehouse District London N4 1DN

 

When – 20 September, 19.00-22.00

Admission – free, no ticket required, but you are requested to RSVP via this link, which contains a lot of useful extra information. 

 

Pictured above: some views of The Ruins by Matthew Frame and Ken Hollings, design by Patrick Fry

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

‘As Above, So Below’: Literature, Divination and Lisa Marie Presley

I cannot remember the exact sequence of events that led up to it, but I had been invited by Mar A Rodrigues, who runs a podcast series out of Portugal called ‘As Above, So Below’, to be interviewed by her for a new episode. MAR had approached me because she wanted to talk about my book The Space Oracle, which had inspired her to create the podcast series in the first place. We were finally able to meet online and talk on the morning of Wednesday January 11, and it turned out to be an absolute pleasure. Lisa Marie Presley hadn’t been part of the story at that point.

 

MAR and I discussed literature and the divinatory arts, history and science fiction, plus some of my earliest memories of space, astrology and magic. Other topics covered in no particular order included:

 

Destroy All Monsters, the Gulf War and 9/11

The Bright Labyrinth, science, magic and eroticism

Dante, The Divine Comedy and The Trash Project 

Purgatory, alchemy and the planets

Strindberg in Paris, the events of May 68 and Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik

Comic books, spiritualism and clairvoyance

 

I enjoyed it all very much – especially when we went on to astrology, a subject about which MAR knew a great deal more than I did. Overall, the conversation lasted about an hour and a half, which has resulted in the first episode of ‘As Above, So Below’ to be broadcast on Spotify in 2023. You can find it by clicking here.

 

Or if you prefer, there is also a video version of our conversation on YouTube, which can be found by clicking here.

 

And then there was Lisa Marie. I am currently finishing Paradise: the third and final part of my Trash Project for Strange Attractor Press. I’d reached the point of compiling a Glossary of Names and References, as I have done for the previous two volumes. These compilations of entries cover all of the individuals mentioned in the text. As a large part of this new book is devoted to Elvis Presley, there were a lot of references to both him and his family entered under ‘P’. I took time away from working on this to record the interview with MAR. I did a little more work on it the following day and managed to complete all the Presley references, except for one. I didn’t really know what I wanted to say about Lisa Marie, so I had deliberately left her until the end. I rose very early on the morning of Friday 13 January, around 5.50 am, specifically to complete the glossary entry for her. As I was preparing to start work, I had the phrase ‘with a heavy heart’ running through my head. I switched on the computer, checked the news headlines, and the first thing I saw was a statement from Priscilla Presley that began ‘It is with a heavy heart…’ announcing her daughter’s death. 

 

To discuss the relationship between writing and divination is interesting enough in the abstract. To go from that to the intuitive foretelling of a death in a couple of days is matter for further conjecture. MAR and I swapped some fascinating messages over the course of the morning, extending the correspondences between writing and divination further still – as if they were ever going to stop. ‘There,’ as Karlheinz Stockhausen once said to me regarding an equally strange connection. ‘I leave that with you.’

 

 

Pictured above

 

MAR

The Space Oracle (2018), available from Strange Attractor Press

MAR and KH on the mic

Purgatory (2022), available from Strange Attractor Press

 

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

 

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

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 Cosmos Is A Work in Progress

On Tuesday January 17 I will be giving a public lecture at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington The talk, called ‘The Cosmos Is A Work in Progress: Astronomy as Data Design’, is presented as part of the School of Visual Communications Work in Progress show.

Here is a an extract from the blurb:

The history of astronomy offers a platform from which we can explore ideas and theories surrounding experimental communication and information design. To examine how the cosmos can fit into that our narrow frame of references is to confront complex issues of representation, illustration, visual complexity and media archaeology. What are we actually seeing when we look at space? Ken Hollings offers a guide to what you've been missing.

So get ready for optical canons, Mayan suicide gods and Saturn devouring his children. The talk is scheduled to start at 4.30. This is a free event, but you will need a ticket to attend. You can order those by clicking here.

For more information on the students’ WIP show, check their Facebook page here.

Pictured above: rarely seen moments in our universe.

Godzilla und Ruinen

Hey Leute!

This is a quick note to let you all know that some sections from my book The Bright Labyrinth have been translated into German and are available for you to read in the most recent edition of Pop Kultur & Kritik available from Transcript Verlag. The extracts in question are all from the chapter ‘Godzilla Has Left The Building And How He Got There’, and reads very well in German, so far as my unpractised eye could tell. I am very pleased and proud to have had my work featured once again in this excellent journal – especially as Godzilla made the front cover and my name and ‘ruinen’ are prominently featured on the back. I hope some of my German readers (I know you exist) will take the time to support this great publication.

Alles güt!