Good heavens?

The London Fortean Society is my local branch of the Forteans. Formed by Charles Hoy Fort in 1931 in a New York flat with the aim of studying, investigating, and/or debunking anomalous phenomena. The London branch meet in pubs, or sometimes even on the streets, to discuss such topics as the architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor, the mystery of the London Stone, the golden age of quackery, and alchemy in 16th century Prague ghettos. A pretty wide remit.

Last night's meeting was in the fantastic Conway Hall. It's like a village hall but in a central London location and is mainly used by the Conway Hall Ethical Society. Advocates of secular humanism and the only remaining ethical society in the UK. Events coming up include talks on psychedelics, a salsa dancing evening, and a family Lego day. Again - a broad church.

I was there, however, for Philip C Almond's talk 'A History of Life after Death' so I grabbed a bottle of Hopping Hare from Dorset's Badger brewery and pulled up a chair in the back row to listen intently to what the Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences (Research) and Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of European Discourses at The University of Queensland had to say. Luckily not his job description as that would've eaten quite heavily into our time.

Time, as we all know, is finite for us. At least in this mortal sphere. But what happens to us after, or doesn't, was the point of the talk. Philip said that up until about 1800 there was a fairly widely held belief in the last judgement and in 'last things'. Catholics believed that the very good went straight to heaven and the very bad straight to hell. Most of us, the naughty ones, had to spend an indefinite period in purgatory first.

Protestant belief was pretty similar. Just without the purgatory bit. In some extreme interpretations God decided, not at the moment of our death, where we'd be going, but at the moment of our birth. Which doesn't sound like there'd have been much of a motivation to lead a virtuous life if you believed that.

Far more common was the idea that, on death, we went into a kind of frozen state and didn't reach our final destination (be it heaven or hell) until the end times, until the planet had ultimately destroyed itself. We were all, basically, in a coma waiting for the world to end.

What's changed in modern thought in the last couple of centuries is that now it's widely accepted, amongst those who still believe, that the afterlife begins almost at the point of death. There's not a lot of hell or purgatory in modern theology either. They're trying to sell this stuff after all.

In many accounts there is no God, as such, in heaven. The older belief of being permanently judged by a capricious creator replaced by the idea that God is now known primarily through the love shown to the other people in heaven.

Swedish theologian, revelator, mystic, and, if you must, scientist Emanuel Swedenborg made great claims in the late 18th century. Utterly fanciful ones to my mind but still ones that gained a lot of traction and shaped modern thinking on these matters.

Possibly his boldest assertion of all was that he, personally, had crossed over to the other side and conversed with those who'd already died. As a reader of Rene Descartes he attempted to fuse Cartesian reason with supposed divine revelation. Philip described it as Cartesianism gone cosmic but Swedenborg sounds like a con man to me.

Swedenborg said that via his 'proof' science and religion could now be reconciled through their differences rather than being at loggerheads with each other. He saw room for both. The angels he'd met, he said, were humans. They lived in houses in heaven which were built in cities in heaven. Both the houses and cities were much the same size and design of those on Earth.

There was even marriage in heaven and after the nuptials a big feast. He didn't specify if everyione got to dance to Come on Eileen afterwards. So similar was heaven to Earth maybe he'd used all his imagination up on the visiting heaven thing in the first place. One thing that was different was that there was no procreation. Not even within marriage. There was sex, just for the fun of it, but no procreation.

Swedenborg inspired the work of William Blake, who saw angels on Peckham Rye (I've seen a few of them), and American feminist author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps whose book The Gates Ajar popularised the concept of a social heaven. It sold huge amounts helped, no doubt, by the fact it was released in 1868. Just three years after the end of the American Civil War when a lot of people were still grieving for loved ones.

Her heaven was full of babies and domesticated life. Which won't sound that heavenly to many. Mark Twain called it a mean ten cent heaven about the size of Rhode Island so unimpressed was he with her lack of vision. She said strawberries and ginger snaps would be available and also work. Yeah, just what we all want to do when we die! You could also meet your pets again as, of course, in this slice of apple pie nirvana, they'd be there.

Whilst we were looking for the spirits though the spirits came looking for us. Or so some would have it. In 1848 a family in New York state began communicating with those who'd passed to the other side. Seances and mediums sprang up around New York and Philadelphia and then further afield.

Eventually some of these spiritualist beliefs became codified. We weren't old or babies in the afterlife but all about 33 years old with fit, unblemished bodies. God had abdicated his role as enforcer of morality and assorted relatives, the dead ones obvs, were to keep a check on us. Although as everyone was about the same age it's hard to work out how hierarchies were formed.

This was the quest for immortality adapted to fit in with the age of science and it was absolute mumbo jumbo of the highest order. Houdini could see that and he crusaded vigorously against fraudulent mediums who he believed, correctly, to be exploiting people's grief in nefarious and painful ways.

Moving into the 20th century Hinduism was first adopted by the West, at least in any significant measure, but something was lost on the journey from India. The wheel of Samsara, the potentially ever recurring cycle of births and rebirths was, in Indian Hinduism something to be escaped. Reincarnation was a curse and the ultimate aim was to be released from that cycle. A bit like Groundhog Day.

The Western take on it celebrated the aspect of reincarnation. They loved the idea of karma where good deeds could be rewarded and sins punished. Aided and abetted by the fact that this wasn't what was happening on Earth.

The Russian occultist Madame Helena Blavatsky, with her Theosophical Society, brought the notion of karma to the West. She told us why bad things happened to good people. Its theories of hidden knowledge and esoteric wisdom helped pave the way for a lot of the nonsense still around now.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't think it was rubbish though. He loved it and in 1920 toured Australia promoting spiritualism and theosophy. Post World War II (and the Spanish flu epidemic) there were, as in Phelps' time, many looking to contact the dead and find peace with themselves. These faith healer types do seem to crop up at very opportune moments.

Conan Doyle held that once everyone had communed with their dead ancestors and these hitherto unknown truths were passed back we'd all be able to live in peace on Earth for ever more. It's a common insult now to describe someone as away with the fairies but Conan Doyle really was. He firmly believed in their existence and was taken in hook, line, and sinker by the notorious fake The Fairies of Cottingley below. If only he'd had the investigative skills of his most famous creation.

Theosophers of the time saw this, to our eyes obvious, fraud as evidence of an evolving new consciousness. They'd been had. But that didn't stop the flow of fantastical creatures. From the pens of Tolkien and Lewis and in the more generalised popular fiction of the day. Most took these fictions to be, just that, fiction. Some will insist to this day that vampires and ghosts exist.

The enchanted and the disenchanted worlds had become more blurred. It seemed that people were able to hold two completely contradictory positions in their mind at once. Was this an example of the aforementioned evolved consciousness or simple hypocrisy? We don't know and we won't know until we die and, I'd wager, not then either.

On this Philip ended a fabulous talk with a quote from the Venerable Bede, the 7th century Northumbrian monk, who wrote, in his History of the English People:-

"It seems to me that the life of man on earth is like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your captains and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall. Outside, the storms of winter rain and snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one window of the hall and out through another. While he is inside, the bird is safe from the winter storms, but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. So man appears on earth for a little while – but of what went before this life, or what follows, we know nothing.”

These words ring as true today as they were when he wrote them nearly 1300 years ago. It'd do us all, including me, some good to remember we simply don't know and therefore are in no fit state to tell anyone else. All we can do is share our ideas and tolerate those ideas we may not agree with.

I'll definitely be back for another visit to both Conway Hall and the London Fortean Society.

A light touch in a heavy world.

It's been heartening of late to see lots of exhibitions devoted both to female artists and to artists from parts of the world that don't feature as often in European galleries. With this in mind the Serpentine Sackler's current Etel Adnan:Weight of the World show seemed a good fit.

Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek mother from Smyrna and a Syrian father who served in the Ottoman army her childhood was spent in Beirut and Dasmascus and she worked both in Paris and Sausalito in the Bay Area of California.

She started painting when studying in California. Her early abstraction later transforming into more representational works. The bold, life enhancing, colours, however, stayed with her and remain to this day. At 91 she's still going strong.

She's made paintings, drawings, tapestries, films, and written both poetry and prose. All underpinned with an appreciation of the beauty of the world whilst acknowledging the violence around her.

The tapestries, above, are a riot of of colour. Bold. Vital. Sun drenched. Happy. They're a pleasure to be in a room with.

They're recent works. The paintings, below, date from the 60s through to the 80s and are informed by a more muted palette. There's hints of Klee and, to my mind, a huge approving nod in the direction of Paul Cezanne's Mont Sainte Victoire post-impressionist and proto-cubist masterpieces.

There are drawings that look a bit like Rorschach tests. There's a film of forests and birds that lasts a whole HOUR which I certainly wasn't going to watch. Not least after a gallery guard told me off for sitting on the wall. Far better was the tribute, below, to Tuscan hill town San Gimignano where I once had the pleasure of spending a night on holiday.

You can ponder Arabic poems on scrolls though, probably like me, you can't read them. They look nice though. Watercolours of mountains and further untitled geometric abstractions follow. Highly aesthetically pleasing. They reminded me of souks, flags, and the Atlas mountains.

The ceramics certainly had something of the East about them. Something also of Kandinsky and the constructivists. If you were to spot a Cossack or two in the corner you wouldn't be surprised.

Last up is this year's Le poids du Monde series. Simple yet effective. Precise yet loose. Geometric but with bursts of Adnan's trademark colour. It's quite a joy to see an artist completing work like this at such a late period in their life. It's equally touching, and a lesson of sorts, to witness someone so clearly in love with both their work and the world that inspires it.

For the work of Etel Adnan is nothing if it is not a joy.

Construction time again.

I try, and more often than not manage, to make an annual pilgrimage to Kensington Gardens each summer to see their pavilion. The idea behind it is that an architect, or architectural firm, who are yet to have a permanent building commissioned in the UK get to construct a temporary edifice for the perusal of visitors whilst at the same time putting theirselves in the shop window.

Some of my favourites have been those designed by Jean Nouvel, Olafur Eliasson (he of the Tate Modern's notorious weather project) who worked with Kjetil Thorsen, and Herzog & De Meuron. Even big names like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Oscar Niemeyer have had a go. Some are better than others but I'm yet to witness an absolute stinker.

This year it's the turn of the Bjarke Ingels Group. New to me they formed in Copenhagen in 2005 and currently employ over 300 architects, designers, and 'thinkers'. Not quite sure who doesn't think but there you go. Ingels and his group have mainly worked in Denmark designing incinerator power plants, Lego museums etc;

On reaching the pavilion I was surprised by both the size and the brickwallyness of it. It's not picture postcard pretty yet it is impressive. It'd drawn a decent crowd on a sunny day.

Inside the twists and curves were far more satisfying and you could even park yourself down for an over priced lentil sandwich, a cup of coffee, or a beer. Being a sad old loner I declined. The man who was clearing up the rubbish asked me to help him. I can't work out if he was just too lazy to do his own job or was taking pity on me.

A bonus this year is the addition of a selection of summer houses. By less renowned but interesting architects. Many of them took their inspiration from Queen Caroline's Temple nearby. Built by William Kent (1685-1748) who used sun path analysis techniques to optimise its potential for viewing sunrises.

Barkow Leibinger (US/Germany) was actually inspired by another Kent pavilion. Now defunct. His undulating structural bands of wood were tempting people to rub their hands along the exterior walls.

The Nigerian architect, creative researcher, and 'urbanist' Kunle Adeyemi (NLE) simply inverted the form of Queen Caroline's Temple. He used soft spongy blocks that were delightful to relax upon whilst watching tourists frolic in the long grass.

Homegrown Asif Khan's construction looked a little cage like but with it's gravelly floor and places to sit was actually proving very popular.

The Hungarian born Frenchman Yona Friedman's modular structure was the least inviting but perhaps the most curious gazebo. Composed of cubes that can be assembled and disassembled in various different ways and decorated with panels displaying replicas of Friedman's own water colours.

It had been an interesting afternoon in the park but I was in for one last twist. Behind Queen Caroline's Temple itself I spotted two men having a swordfight. Fencing basically. I'd not really seen men waving swords around in a park before and it was a spectacle as curious as some of the wackier architecture. It was a little dinky cherry on the cake of culture I'd filled myself up with. Burp.

Piss artists

I like a drink. Sometimes I like one a bit too much.

I like to visit a gallery. Sometimes I like to visit galleries a bit too often.

So Tate Britain''s free Art and Alcohol exhibition was always going to tempt me in. Binge drinking isn't new in British art. Some of the works celebrate it. Most criticize. The first British boozing paintings were inspired by 17th century Dutch tavern scenes and we kick off with Hogarth's infamous 1751 etching Gin Lane.

Set in the slums of Covent Garden it portrays an era when uncontrolled production and sale of gin created drunken chaos in Georgian Britain and moral panic about rising alcoholism. A companion piece, Beer Street, showed the supposedly more wholesome effects of that particular poison. Which, presumably, include less hanging in attics and plummeting babies. I'll drink to that.

Richard Billingham's 1994 Ray's A Laugh series chronicles his own father's spiralling addiction. The almost hyper real colour serves only to render the mundane bleakness more vivid.

Gilbert & George considered drinking a duty, rather than a pleasure (or a need) and, in truth, rarely touched the stuff. Ironically, because of this, their work lacks clarity and comes across as both dilettantish and aloof.

Edward Le Bon's 1940 Saloon Bar rings truer. It shows a woman drinking alone, verging on scandalous in those days, in a Knightsbridge tavern and, for emphasis, it has been paired with Louis MacNiece's contemporary poem Alcohol.

William Mulready's 1809 Returning From The Ale House takes issue, indulgently, with drunken fathers and borrows its style from the aforementioned Dutch genre paintings.

At the same time David Wilkie painted Village Holiday showing a drunkard torn between vice and virtue, wife and wantonness, It's instructive that both Wilkie and Mulready needed to tone down, or excise completely, references to alcohol in their works in order to sell them.

Benjamin Haydon's Chairing The Member (euphemism?) takes us further into a dipsomaniac fug. In the lower left corner a cowering wreck has been driven insane by his sottish ways. As others in the painting parade around hitting each other with glasses and wearing crockery on their heads our man holds a finger to his mouth. A lush assuming the audience to be co-conspirators in his predilection.

The centrepiece is George Cruikshank's vast 1860 Worship of Bacchus. The Victorian moralist, whose own father had died in a drinking contest during the height of Regency excess, paints a panorama of pissedness. Toasts and taverns right down to a inebriated idiot beating a woman's face to a pulp. Bacchus himself stands proudly over a scene that sees men in harlequin costumes and babies being fed booze. I've never been so drunk I've put a jester's outfit on but that's something to look forward to.

Robert Martineau also came from the Victorian moralist school. His Last Day in the Old Home (1862) shows the genteel Pulleyne family driven to ruin by port, champagne, and gambling and forced to sell their ancestral home.

It was a neat little free show that Tate Britain does so well. I certainly felt warned off the dangers of the demon drink but not so much that I didn't walk immediately into the first pub I saw on exiting the Pimlico institution.

Bottoms up!

Golub:Masks of Power.

Leon Golub was born in Chicago. He studied in Chicago and he lived in Chicago. He was very much a Chicago man through and through. Alas, the artists from that city have not laid claim to such prominence as its economists. The National Portrait Gallery, with their current exhibition, are doing their bit to remedy that. Only a small bit though. The show's sandwiched into a mezzanine floor up a steep flight of stairs just before you enter the real galleries.

Golub is most well known for his paintings of riots, torture, and interrogation and, hopefully for him, some of the psychological tension and depth of those come through in his portraiture. Working on images from mass media he hopes to document both the arrogance and the venality of nominally powerful men. And they are all men.

He views his political portraits as skins, or rubber masks (early influence on Spitting Image?). Realistic but expressionless. He sees the powerful and how they act but also sees the powerlessness, the hopelessness, that resides as deep within these people as it does all of us. Does he feel some kind of sympathy for these devils?

All of the portraits in the show are acrylic on linen and they begin with a quartet of Francos. The Franco series were made in 1976, a year after the Spanish dictator's death. Francisco Franco Bahamonde created a vast network of terror and surveillance which oversaw ruthless oppression of any critics of his regime.

Fidel Castro is a more divisive character with many admirers on the left. After deposing Fulgencio Batista he's seen Cuba through various phases. Alliances with the Soviet Union, a tourist hotspot etc; Literacy and education are paramount across the island but, as with many of these 'guys', opposition is barely tolerated and a cult of personality has built up around him. Something, with the rise of Trump, Johnson, Corbyn etc;, we need to be very careful about.

Trump and Johnson are, obviously, without a shadow of doubt, bad men. Corbyn appears to be a very good man. Yet, it can't be denied there is a personality cult growing around him. Fed and watered by supporters who'll brook no criticism. If I'm gonna look at these things I'm gonna look at my own side too. One man very few will be annoyed at me for taking objection to is Augusto Pinochet. Very much a cunt's cunt and close ally of our own Margaret Thatcher who was quite happy to turn her back as he had women raped by dogs in football stadia. Better than those damn Argies, eh? This bulwark to communism presided over a regime that tortured dissidents and yet, or perhaps because of it, saw an economic boom led by a small coterie of Chilean economists who'd studied in Illinois and became known as the Chicago boys. I prefer the Chicago of Golub and the songs of Sufjan Stevens.

Hourari Boumediene, above, became president of Algeria after a 1965 coup d'etat. Whilst pursuing an official policy of non-alignment he also, furtively, strove to seek closer links with the dominant Soviet Union.

A country led, at that time, by the man above. Leonid Brezhnev served as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party between 1964 and 1982. Political expansionism and the build up of arms went hand in hand with the deterioration in the quality of life for ordinary citizens under his watch. The Brezhnev Doctrine (Soviet right to interfere in the affairs of any communist country not adhering to the Soviet model, hey! you! you're not doing communism properly!) saw the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and military action against the mujahideen in Afghanistan which helped pave the way for the rise of that country's Taliban. Bad guys aren't just bad guys in life. They leave a legacy of shit that affects us all.

Perhaps a more controversial choice in this chamber of horrors is Giovanna Battista Montini who was elected to the papacy as Pope Paul VI in 1964 and served until his death in 1978. Here we see him re-enacting the famous David Mellor/Antonia de Sancha toe sucking moment sans Chelsea kit. Epic bantz aside he was, in some ways, a reformer yet he unswervingly opposed birth control and ordination of women. Perhaps he was just an old fashioned misogynist using his 'faith' as an excuse or perhaps as a toe sucking infallible human birth control wasn't something he needed to consider. Either way in any gallery of nasties the catholic church, like all churches, should be represented so thanks, Leon.

The Pope may have, at least on the surface, opposed the Vietnam War, but Henry Kissinger certainly didn't. Supporting both that and our old rape friendly buddy Pinochet's overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende won him the Nobel Peace Prize. An event that caused Tom Lehrer to claim satirism had become obsolete. He worked for and/or advised presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford and thus played a crucial, though partial, role in the the history of the last century. An intellectual heavyweight by the standards of today's politics but as nasty as the stump orators that preside over our present debates. It's worrying to note that even when politics wasn't the preserve of dickheads that bad men still rose to the top.

One tick in Kissinger's credit ledger is that he opposed the apartheid rule of Ian Smith's Rhodesia and helped aid transition to black majority rule. The same could not be said for James Eastland. A white supremacist from Mississippi plantation owning stock (and make of that what you will). As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee he ruthlessly obstructed all attempts at civil rights legislation.

Another massive racist was Philadelphia police commissioner Francis Rizzo, above. He specifically targeted black neighbourhoods and oversaw, personally probably, strip searches of members of the Black Panther Party. In some ways it's a pity he's no longer with us as there's, surely, a high ranking job in the St Louis force waiting for him right now. I wonder what The Wire's Clay Davis would have to say about this state of affairs but I'm lost for words....

John Foster Dulles, who I assume the airport to be named after, was Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower where he embarked upon an aggressive (and global) anti-communist foreign policy. His push for American support for the French forces in Indochina laid the foundations, set the table, and handed out the dirty chopsticks, for the later Vietnam War.

Hey! What's Michael Foot doing here? Totally out of place amongst these crooks, xenophobes, and exalted mobsters. An intellectual with great oratory skills he was considered too lefty and too scruffy to ever be elected. Remind you of anyone? Whilst undoubtedly being a highly moral man his idealism led to internal divisions within the Labour party that eventually caused a schism. The gang of four leaving to form the SDP. I still don't think Foot deserves his place with these other monsters though.

More comfortable in the company of bigots like Eastland and Rizzo is George Wallace, above. Four times presidental candidate and four times Democractic governor of Alabama (where my maternal grandfather comes from, fact fans). He did all this whilst campaigning for segregationist measures and against integration. An assassination attempt left him severely disabled. Towards the end of his life, in a glimmer of hope for humanity, he retracted many of his more extreme racist attitudes and his last term of governor was enabled through significant African American support.

Valery Giscard D'Estaing, French president from '74-'81, pursued a modernist approach he'd honed during his tenure of Finance Minister under both de Gaulle and Pompidou. On the plus side he strived for better European cooperation. Less positive was his support to Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic and, later on, his support for the coup that overthrew him. Sometimes the French have an attitude towards their former colonies that makes us Brits look enlightened. Sometimes!

So, what was it all about? What was Golub trying to say? I really don't know. I found it fascinating historically but as an art exhibition it didn't really go anywhere. The vacant stares of elderly men is something I can get any day, any place. Perhaps that's what it's all about. Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil writ on linen with acrylic. Maybe a warning that men with good intentions still do bad things. Something Tony Blair may like to share from the dock of The Hague. But also a reminder that even ill intentioned men sometimes get it right It's all very confusing and though I left feeling I had more knowledge than I came in with I did wonder if knowledge really was power and, even if it was, if that was even a good thing.