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The Ammo City WTC interview
Questions presented by Declan O’Neil 10.9.01, answered
by Ken Hollings 11.9.01. Time changes everything…
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Is
there a defining moment that started you down the road less
travelled? |
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I started writing DAM because it seemed to me that 21st-century
politics, that is to say, the 21st century itself had begun
a decade ahead of schedule with the start of Operation Desert
Storm. The defining moment for me was the live coverage on CNN
of the missile attack on Baghdad: war as a futuristic spectacle
that was taking place twenty-four hours a day in people’s
living room. Reality had become the tiny scanned images being
transmitted from a Cruise missile approaching its target: that
was the first time you heard people talking seriously about
Nintendo games as a metaphor not just for combat but the involvement
of the spectator in combat. Today we tend to take ‘21st-century’
things like CNN, Nintendo, Virtual Reality and the Internet
for granted, but they were hardly known about prior to the Gulf
War. Afterwards it seemed as if they'd always been there. People
forget all this far too quickly, which is why I chose to write
Destroy All Monsters as a novel, as a fantasy based upon history,
rather than as a critical commentary. |
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Seeing
as you write mainly factual work how come Destroy' became a
work of fiction? Do you feel fiction is a better way to deal
with the landscape? |
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To
tell the truth, I never really make any great distinction
between writing fiction or more analytical pieces. I have
also written texts for the Dutch electronic music composer
Huib Emmer – we have a new stage piece, ‘Rorschach
Audio’, receiving its first performance at the Ysbreker
in Amsterdam next month, in fact – and I contributed
an alternative libretto to Mangina’s production of Stravinsky’s
Oedipus Rex at the ICA last November. What concerns me most
in all cases is creating a text that stimulates new ideas
and perspectives in the reader and that also gives pleasure.
I guess I should point out, however, that DAM reads like a
vast trash epic, complete with references to movies, computer
games, Japanese manga, conspiracy theories etc. This is, after
all, a novel in which Elvis returns from the grave as a political
assassin. You’ve gotta have some fun.
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How
long have you been working on Destroy? How did the project evolve?
Did it have any previous incarnation? |
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It
took a while to get the structure right. If you want to look
at a very early manifestation of the material, there’s
my original sketch for the novel ‘Eletronically Yours,
Eternally Elvis’ published in The Last Sex from St Martin’s
Press. That was pretty much the starting point. For a more
analytical take on the themes and subjects of DAM, there’s
my essay ‘Tokyo Must Be Destroyed’, which is very
easy to find on the Net. An American journalist recently told
me that lot of Godzilla sites have links to it, which I find
extremely flattering.
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If
you had to pitch Destroy at Hollywood, how would you pitch it? |
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Under the current circumstances, I don’t think a novel
that makes such a big feature of the America’s systematic
destruction by Terror Monsters, Alien Invaders and armed renegades
is going to go down all that well in Hollywood. However, I’d
love to place a copy of the book in Tim Burton’s hands.
I greatly admire what he was trying to do in Ed Wood and Mars
Attacks!
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How
did the collaboration with Savage Pencil come about? |
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I’ve
admired Savage Pencil’s work for many years, so when
the idea of including a comic book element in Destroy All
Monsters was first raised, I immediately thought of him. Fortunately,
Sav and I share a number of mutual friends so it wasn’t
too difficult to contact him. He demonstrated remarkable patience
and insight in his approach to DAM and I think that shows
in the final artwork, which I love. He’s just the best.
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Do
you see yourself as being part of any literary tradition? Are
you content with the mondo bizarro correspondent image? In what
context would you prefer to be seen? |
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Oh,
jeez. Just so long as they spell my name right. I’m
not really aware of writing within any tradition. Can traditions
still be said to exist in this century, outside the world
of occultism? I’m not sure. Everyone creates their own
histories these days. I probably learned most of what I know
about narrative structure from Hergé’s Tintin
stories, especially the two-volume Moon Adventure. Beyond
that, I’m ‘uneasy’ as Blake would say.
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Would
you like to get involved in television work? |
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As
long as you are prepared to be disappointed, TV work can be
really interesting. It’s still the main reference point
for our collective sense of reality. Shouldn’t we all
want to get involved?
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Why
do you think it has taken so long for the bizarre, the marginal
and the conspiratorial to become mainstream? Is it a matter
of economics and/or part of a wider agenda to disseminate more
forms of information? |
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Mass culture, by which I mean that which was established in
the 18th-century and which started its
slow collapse in the wake of the First World War, has always
defined itself by what it excluded: ie whatever didn’t
have a place within a productive industrial society and knew
what that place was. Consequently everything delinquent was
pushed out to the margins. Mass culture, as a means of organizing
people’s perceptions and consciousness, was dealt its
deathblow during the sixties; that last great age of gurus and
messiahs. Those distinctions, which not even television can
maintain these days, no longer exert the same influence. Enter
the strange, the bizarre singularity, the multiplicity of responses…
It’s almost impossible to open your mouth without referring
to everything in the plural these days. Such a process doesn’t
happen overnight. It takes decades.
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Are
you optimistic as regards our futures? Do you have any Luddite
tendencies or are you happy to embrace what's ahead? |
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I’m always optimistic about the future, although I miss
the confidence and certainty with which it was discussed in
the 1950s. We should all be vacationing on Mars by now! At
the same time I’m equally happy to discuss new technology
with Luddites from their point of view. I really miss Mars
though…
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What
or who do you see as the next biggest threat/enemy of global
capitalism? Will we see more Timothy McVeighs and Unabombers? |
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It only took a few minutes for this question
to change its entire meaning yesterday. ‘Tokyo Must be
Destroyed’, which was written in the wake of the Kobe
Earthquake, describes cities and landmarks as vast studio sets
for disaster movies that have yet to take place. It connects
the blackened remains of the Koresh compound at Waco with the
triumphal architecture of Baghdad, the ruined terrain of the
Kuwaiti Theatre of Operations and the Federal Building in Oklahoma.
Since writing that piece, I’ve witnessed the continued
blurring of these cultural inputs to the point where they’re
overtly apparent in our reactions to what has just happened
in America, to our means of perceiving it. There was a moment
last night when they were broadcasting a live sequence showing
President Bush walking from his helicopter across the White
House Lawn and he was completely alone. No one was with him.
If you can focus a camera on one man like that and isolate him,
then you can aim a weapon at him as well. But we’re talking
about a far larger scale of turmoil here. During the LA riots,
films like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Terminator, which
also depicted a police station under armed attacked, all but
disappeared. Unfortunately no one can say now that Hollywood
wasn’t already busy making big-budget movies like Siege,
which features references to Oklahoma and Somalia together with
a highly organized Middle Eastern terrorist attack on Manhattan
and Arlington Road, which references Ruby Ridge alongside a
– highly successful - terrorist attack on Washington DC
by right-wing extremists. Thanks to TriStar Columbia, even Godzilla’s
been to New York. National territoriality has become a thing
of the past: it’s a cultural space that’s now being
fought over – one structured and regulated by the media.
Unfortunately it doesn’t stop people getting killed. DAM
is very much a reflection of this.
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To
what extent do your interests inform your politics and ethics? |
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Completely.
I wouldn’t be able to answer your questions otherwise.
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What's
your slant on the likes of David Icke and David Irving? Is there
a place in academia for their theories? |
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To
the extent that they expose the discontinuities and conflicts
in our established methods of communication and perception,
they do have a place. It’s depressing to note, however,
that even such enthusiastic irrationalism as theirs tends
to follow the same dreary and predictable lines as their more
rational and orthodox counterparts.
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How
do you see the future of the internet? |
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It’s
the million-petalled lotus of pure white light.
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What's
the future for recreational drugs? |
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See
previous answer.
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I
know you've been involved in Strange Attractor. Do you see any
'scene' developing around such events? Anything similar coming
up? |
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 I
was very pleased to be invited to take part in the first Strange
Attractor event. It was an extremely memorable occasion. As
to a ‘scene’ developing and the reasons for its
existence, I did take a moment during the panel discussion
that night to give special thanks to one man who has done
more than anyone else to bring conspiracy theories into the
mainstream: Richard M. Nixon. Without his delusional politics
and paranoid visions, we’d still be regarded as nutball
pariahs. We owe him so much.
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Can
you list ten of your personal internet bookmarks - sites, publications
or shows worth checking out? |
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My
bookmarks are in a terrible mess. I save them all. It’s
total chaos in there. Believe me.
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What
is the most important lesson life has taught you? |
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Love,
magic and hard work can all make things happen, so be careful
what you do with them.
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Finally,
do we need more Jon Ronson's and Louis Theroux's? |
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I
don’t know. Would they be prepared to let me plug Destroy
All Monsters on their shows?
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