The New Year Comes...

And nobody is home...

I have been working over most of the Christmas holidays, catching up on deadlines and finishing another chapter for my new book, The Bright Labyrinth. Regular posts should start appearing on this blog again very soon. In the meantime this is to wish you all a very happy 2011.

Pictured above: Vienna pension, April 2010

Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy

A Modern Revolutionary Peking Opera

Revised collectively by the ‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’ Group of the Peking Opera Troup of Shanghai (July 1970 Script)

FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRESS

PEKING 1971

‘Revolutionary culture is a powerful revolutionary weapon for the broad masses of the people. It prepares the ground ideologically before the revolution comes and is an important, indeed essential, fighting front in the general revolutionary front during the revolution.’

- Mao Tsetung

Reproduced above: front cover of the published script, complete with songs and production, plus Scene One, ‘Advancing in Victory’ – wishing a very happy Christmas indeed to all my readers.

Resonance 104.4fm Wins Radio Academy Award

I have just been informed that Resonance 104.4fm, home from home to the ‘Hollingsville’ and ‘Welcome to Mars’ radio series, won the Radio Academy’s Nations & Regions Award for London last night – and for the second year running. The judges said: ‘We agree that the winner should be Resonance FM. The judges felt this was the type of radio to be admired and applauded. Experimental and unique with a clear focus and raison d’être. Anyone who thinks UK radio has become bland and homogenised should listen to Resonance FM. It revels in its eclecticism, champions creativity, experiments with sound, dares to take risks, celebrates London’s vast cultural diversity and brings true meaning to the word “variety,” because you genuinely have no idea what’s coming next. It offers a service not available anywhere else and London would be a poorer place without it.’

My congratulations to everyone involved.

Pictured above: KH at the microphone in the Resonance 104.4fm studio just seconds before TX, courtesy of roving shutterbug Kitty Keen

Found 0bjects Podcast Available Again

When the first Found 0jects podcast was posted a couple of weeks ago, the demand for downloads swiftly exceeded bandwidth, which resulted in its unavailability for a while. It is now being hosted elsewhere and is available once again by clicking here. Many thanks to Dolly Dolly for setting up these new arrangements. This has been a public service announcement.

Pictured above: scenes from the podcast recording session (click on the honeycomb to activate); cover design for the 1964 Panther edition of The Dawn of Magic by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier: ‘Is the secret society destined to be the form of future government?’ – from the back-cover copy.

‘Hollingsville’ Christmas Lecture at CSM

This Wednesday December 8 I am giving a special ‘Hollingsville’ presentation at Central St Martins for students on the MA Communication Design Course. An overview of the main themes and historical context of my recent book Welcome to Mars, ‘Lounge: Welcome to Disturbia’ looks at how space and sensory experience were profoundly altered with the rapid expansion of the Suburbs after World War II. Ranged in precise grids, connected to its own set of local amenities, suburbia became an isolated colony, a behavioural laboratory in which individuals were to be studied by a growing professional elite of social scientists. What they found was subsequently labelled by one psychiatrist as ‘Disturbia’: a place where audiovisual technology had invaded the already overheated environment of the modern home. Get ready for strange drugs, the even stranger tribal rites of the middle classes, flying saucers, radioactive mutants and teenagers from outer space! The lecture will take place in the MACD Main Studio on the Back Hill campus and starts at 10.00 am – admission is free.


Suggested reading:
Thomas Hine, Populuxe, Bloomsbury Press, 1989
Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music, A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong, Quartet Books, 1995
Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War, MIT Press, 2007
Francesco Adinolfi, Mondo Exotica: Sounds Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation, Duke University Press, 2008

Pictured above: The 1956 Motorama ‘Kitchen of Tomorrow’

Fashion in Film Lecture

On the evening of Wednesday, December 1, I am giving a short talk at the Horse Hospital  as part of this year’s Fashion in Film Festival. I have been asked by the festival organizers not to go into any specifics about the event, so here is their press release instead, which should give you some idea what to expect: 

Wednesday 1 December The Horse Hospital 19.00
total running time of films c.170min (with a short break in between).
Tickets £10, concessions £8

 You absolutely must come dressed as your own madness if you wish to be admitted to the Fashion in Film Festival’s opening ceremony, a special film club night co-hosted exclusively for your pleasure by the brilliant Ken Hollings and a pair of London legends Princess Julia and Felicity Hayward. The evening will kick off with a mystery double bill screening featuring one of cinema’s greatest mavericks, plus a fiendish mix of lavish costumes and masks, dark rituals and a profusion of sequins and sparkles.

Post-screening, Princess Julia and Felicity Hayward will DJ into the night. Make sure to dress up to the nines for this unmissable event, the stranger the better… unless your madness is called normality.

‘London Noir’ Meets ‘Londres Noir’

Asphalte Editions in Paris have just published a very fine French translation of London Noir, the anthology of stories based in and around the mother of all dark cities edited by my old friend Cathi Unsworth. Other contibutors include Barry Adamson, Max Decharne, Stewart Home, Ken Bruen and Martyn Waites. The Asphalte version is rather elegant, right down to the Jamie Reid colour scheme of the cover; and I am particularly pleased with how my story Betamax reads in French – in some ways I think I even prefer it to the original, particularly with regard to how the future tense works in this new version. You can find more details by clicking here. For those of you who still have to check out the original, available from Serpents Tail, you can order it by clicking here.

See also:

London Noir International
Cathi Unsworth Knows Where You Live