Psychic frequencies:A dark star has risen in the West.

"Was it destiny? I don't know yet. Was it just by chance. Could this be Kismet?" - (I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear - Blondie.

I'd gone along to Conway Hall for a London Fortean Society talk about the influence of occultism, esoterica, and chaos magick on the far right ultra conservative side of politics but I was to start my evening with something of a very welcome surprise.

On taking my seat I Googled the speaker Gary Lachman to see if I could find out more about him. I certainly could. His Wikipedia page revealed he used to call himself Gary Valentine and was a founder member of Blondie who played bass in that band and wrote the music for X-Offender and the music AND lyrics for their huge hit single, the rather beautiful '(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear'.

What's more, as the evening went on Gary revealed that the lady he'd written that song for was not only in the audience but was sitting a seat but one from me. She looked as embarrassed as she did touched to have this brought to the audience's attention.

Completing a hat-trick of Blondie based revelations on the way home from the walk, on my way to the 63 bus stop on Blackfriars Road, I looked up the lyrics to '(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear' and found that they're peppered with references to psychic frequencies, theosophies, levitating lovers, secret stratospheres, and outer entities. Gary Lachman/Valentine is not new to this stuff. That single came out in April 1978. He's been doing it for at least forty years

After he left Blondie he played for a while with various other bands and toured with Iggy Pop before moving to London in 1996 (the same year as me) and becoming a full time writer (sadly, unlike me) contributing to The Guardian, Mojo, and the Times Literary Supplement before putting out books on subjects like the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, his own role in the punk wars, and, bringing us back to the talk itself, occultism, consciousness, and 'spiritual science'.

As I sat with my bottle of Volvic and packet of mints (I was 'rewarding' myself for getting my blood pressure down to a 'good' level by having an evening off the sauce) and people snapped up copies of Lachman's new book 'Dark Star Rising:Magick and Power in the Age of Trump', the second part also the name of this talk, the room filled up nicely and Lachman began by outlining the recent, and curious, rise of occult politics in the USA, Russia, and Europe.

He made it clear that occultism isn't just employed by ultra-conservatives and devotees of the far-right but all across the political spectrum, his last book 'Politics and the Occult:The Right, The Left, and The Radically Unseen' in 2008 had tackled that, but that, tonight, he was here to talk specifically about that end of politics and his most recent book's writing, and this speech, were both, of course, inspired by the rise of one particularly divisive and insidious character. You've guessed it. It's the man everyone loves to hate. It's Donald Trump.

"We made this dream our reality" are the words that white supremacist alt-right founder Richard Spencer said on the election of Trump to a room full of two hundred odd members of the National Policy Institute who gave him and Trump not only a standing ovation but a Nazi salute. Although Spencer later backtracked and claimed it wasn't a Nazi salute but a good old fashioned Roman salute. Hmmm.

What Spencer was trying to say with "we made this dream our reality" is that, somehow, Spencer and his ilk had used the power of their minds to will Donald Trump into the White House. It's a bit like Noel Edmond's infamous cosmic ordering but with even more terrifying results.

Movements like New Thought, Mind Power, and Mental Science all drill down deep on the idea that "thoughts create reality". Not necessarily in a direct way but in a mysterious, indirect, way. This was the first, but not the last, time that Lachman had me wondering. His talk was fascinating, if a little necessarily inchoate, but he did lose me a bit at times.

He backed up his assertion of the possibility, if not the probability, of thoughts creating reality by saying that noted thinkers from Plato to Jung, from John Locke to Emmanuel Swedenborg, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge had all posited similar, if highly differently motivated, theories in the past. Certainly none of those names would have used what Spencer and his racist friends did. Something called 'meme magic'.

So the story began of how Pepe the Frog, once a harmless amphibian slacker, drifted to the dark side. The young Donald Trump was a devotee of New Thought and, with his father, used to attend Norman Vincent Peale's sermons at the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in New York. Peale wrote, in 1952, the negatively reviewed but hugely influential and massively popular 'The Power of Positive Thinking' and Trump was so enamoured of the man and his ideas that he even had his first two weddings in Peale's church.

Peale, and his book, and his sermons, drummed into Trump that success is everything and in Trump's own book (which he almost definitely didn't write) Trump echoes the mantra that winning is all that matters to the degree that he openly admits he'll do anything within the bounds of legality to win. Morals simply don't come in to it and it's not a stretch to imagine the clause about legality was only included to save him future lawsuits. Does anyone really believe that Donald Trump does not consider himself above the law?

Trump claimed he was Peale's greatest student ever. Of course, he did. Trump claims he's the greatest at everything ever. Trump lies as easily as he breathes. Judging by his diet probably easier. Trump also learnt from Peale that facts don't matter but how we think about, or present, these 'facts' or, in the words of the heinous Kellyanne Conway, the 'alternative facts'.

Lachman made a case for this line of thinking dating back to the Stoic school of Hellenistic philosophy but we didn't have time to linger on all things Greek (this talk could have veered off on so many different routes and remained utterly absorbing) and soon moved on to chaos magick. Trump's not a magician himself (no shit) but he does use some of the techniques of chaos magick to empower himself.

It's a results based technique that is utilitarian, practical, and functional. Trump doesn't see reality as a stable thing. Hence we now have post-truth and fake news. Nietzsche predicted that this kind of nihilism would arrive in the 21st century and so it has come to pass. If deconstructionism and post-modernism have 'liberated' us from Western rationalism then at what cost and who seeks to benefit?

People like Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin unfortunately, it seems. In front of an audience at the Vatican in 2014 Bannon spoke about his usual bete noires of Islamofascism (which is a very real thing) and immigration (which has been used to whip up hatred and isn't related to Islamofascism) but he also namechecked one Julius Evola, an Italian esoteric thinker of the extreme right who felt Mussolini's ideas not to be sufficiently fascist and threw his lot in with the Nazis instead. Due to his ideological form of racism (he believed your race was defined by your 'soul', Hitler and the rest believed you couldn't change your race) he was unable to work with them. Though his racism of the soul was just as pernicious as Hitler's racism of the blood.

Post-war, Evola's writings found popularity amongst and informed Italian neo-fascist groups and this is why Bannon mentioned him. His 'magical' way of influencing, or controlling, people using chaos was adapted by Aleksandr Dugin, the man known as Putin's Rasputin for the power he carries in Putin's court. Bannon, a fan of Putin's 'traditional values' was talking about Evola in context with Dugin.

Dugin is also a devotee of chaos magic and hopes to use it to create an all out war that causes the 'end of times'. Scared yet? Or does this sound like bullshit? Well, Dugin's ideas, as interpreted by Putin, have already caused, or at least helped to cause, the wars in Ukraine and Crimea. Many deaths have come from Dugin's ideas and many more will do still.

Dugin's belief system is a pick'n'mix of many things. Stalinism, Nazism, fascism but definitely not 'liberal democracy'. An idea he decries as 'decadent' and responsible for all that is wrong in the world. He styles himself as the antithesis to Francis Fukuyama's now, admittedly discredited (thanks to the likes of Dugin), theory that we are at the 'end of history'.

To show how far back this illiberal philosophy goes Lachman took a brief detour into one of Evola's key influences, the French author Rene Guenon who also went under the name Abd al-Wahid Yahya. Guenon believed that Western culture had been deteriorating for centuries and saw the Renaissance as one of the key engines in that change as it spurred people away from spiritual and aesthetic concerns towards rationalist thought and theory.

Hugely influenced by Hinduism, Guenon thought we were currently in the Kali-Yuga stage or cycle, described in the Sanskrit scriptures as a time of strife, quarrel, and discord but one that would eventually give way to the golden age of Satya Yuga when humanity is governed by gods and every manifestation or work is close to the purest ideal and humanity will allow intrinsic goodness to rule supreme. It seems Guenon, Evola, Dugin, and Bannon (and indeed ISIS, philosophically their fellow travelers) feel that this age needs to be pushed into action, willed into being, and if a global war possibly resulting in several million or even several billion deaths is the outcome then that's a price worth paying. That's what they call collateral damage.

Both Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl have said, after a fashion, that what happens in the mind informs not just our perception of the world but the actual world we percieve. Jung's concept of synchronicity, or 'meaningful coincidences', has been transferred to cyberspace and turned into 'meme magic' or synchromysticism and Lachman cited a list of coincidences relating to the Germanwings Flight 9525 that crashed in to the Alps north west of Nice in March 2015 killing 150 people.

This was the only time in the talk I felt Lachman might've been reading too much into coincidence. He didn't say these things were probable but he said they were possible. I though they were pure coincidence. We'll have to disagree on that. I'm not falling out with the bassist of Blondie, no way!

The coincidences were all to do with the film The Dark Knight Rises! Tom Hardy played Bane in the film and the nearest city to the crash, Divonne-les-bains, has 'bains' in it which sounds a bit similar. That was about the level of it and I felt it wasn't a great example of how this stuff works.

Which was a pity. As the talk had been excellent and it kind of faded out rather than went out with a bang. There's two reasons for that. (1) Lachman has a book to sell (and it looked to me like he was doing okay with it) and (2) this is still ongoing stuff. Looked at from the outside there can be no rational reason why people like Trump and Putin are in power when they're both such obviously destructive forces so we look to irrational forces to try to understand them.

The danger then being that we become as irrational as those we're trying to counter. That, if nothing else, proves the lethal power of chaos and destabilization. It was suggested at the end of the talk that we could use psychic self-defence to think these monsters out of existence but I still believe our best line of defence is to stand firm in our rational denouncing of them, to not fall for their arsonists dressed as fireman schtick, and to educate, agitate, organise whenever we can. March, complain, rant, don't take this shit lying down. Don't let them make you the bad guy.

As we learnt earlier Pepe the Frog started off as an innocent anthropomorphic pond dweller whose catchphrase "Feels good man" is a long way from "It's OK to be white" (or green in his case) but internet trolls and scared little fascists cowering in their bedrooms transitioned him to the far right against his creator's will. Have they done the same with Donald Trump? Is the reality TV show host the simulation that became real? Is Trump the Frankenstein's monster our modern world has allowed us to create that we've now lost control of? Well, Frankenstein's monster only became violent when love was withheld from him. Trump is incapable of even grasping the concept of love so Trump is way worse than any imagined monster. Trump is real, Trump has power, and Trump is actively working to the agenda of people who openly admit that they're looking to advance an all out war and bring about not Fukuyama's end of history but the end of times.

It's time to be very fucking scared indeed. We're all fucked by his presence, dear!

A London walk on the theme of....Brutalism (slight return).

"In the shade of the Trellick Tower I spent a while trying to keep you" - Trellick Tower, Emmy the Great.

It might've been better if I'd gotten Emmy the Great to host my second Brutalist London walk. It's not that it was a bad day, far from it, but more that it wasn't particularly brutal. With four parks crossed, waterfowl a plenty, gorgeous sunshine, and laughs galore it certainly wasn't the grey concrete nightmare scenario that those of a cynical nature may've imagined.

As ever, we met at noon in Waterloo station, on the mezzanine, in Benugo, by the big clock. There was a 'good turnout' (if not a record beating one). Myself, Shep, Adam, Pam, Neil, Belinda, Sanda, and Dena started the walk and we were later joined by Colin, fashionably late, who'd come down from Oxford.

The idea was to finish off the walk we failed to complete back in February but as there were only two buildings left to see on that walk I added a couple more in and because it was happening on a sunny day I rerouted the walk to take in plenty of green spaces. I wrongfooted my fellow walkers by taking a left down Belvedere Road and then through Jubilee Gardens where we joined the heaving tourist hordes waiting to go on the London Eye.

There was a monument to the International Brigade that fought in the Spanish Civil War that I'd never noticed before despite an inscription on it saying it was unveiled by Michael Foot back in 1985. We crossed Westminster Bridge, a sea of human traffic, identified Boudicca in Thomas Thornycroft's Boadicea and Her Daughters statue, and crossed in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament (Elizabeth Tower covered in scaffolding) to Parliament Square and its statues of Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Gandhi, Jan Smuts, Nelson Mandela, and, of course, the recently unveiled one of campaigner for women's suffrage Millicent Fawcett, sculpted by Gillian Wearing after Caroline Criado Perez's admirable campaign. 

The March for a People's Vote was due to arrive in Parliament Square in an hour or so and many EU flags were already being flown in anticipation. Bearing in mind the likely disasters of Brexit and the government's utterly woeful handling of said Brexit it was a march I very much supported. One I may have attended if I had not been so fully dedicated to London by Foot:The Capital's Curious Circuits.

We passed a Volvo, of course a Volvo, literally plastered in anti-Brexit slogans and the baroque grandeur of the Methodist Central Hall while we looked across to the huge queues of people waiting to go into Westminster Abbey. But there would be not a soul lining up to see 102 Petty France, our first brutalist icon.

102 Petty France was designed by Basil Spence (whose house, very much not a brutalist building, I happened across in Canonbury on Friday) who is most famous for rebuilding Coventry Cathedral after it was bombed in World War II. Completed in 1976 it certainly would've stood out among the Georgian town houses of the area and not all were happy about its erection. Norman St John-Stevas, later Lord Fawsley and a former Tory Minister of State for the Arts, complained that not only did Spence ruin one of London's finest parks, nearby St James's Park, but two. We shall see what he 'did' to Hyde Park soon.

102 Petty France now houses the Ministry of Justice but until 2004 was the HQ of the Home Office. It stands very close to Charles Holden's 55 Broadway which we took in as part of our Art Deco walk last summer. As with that walk we next turned down Queen Anne's Gate and crossed Birdcage Walk into St James's Park. It was a beautiful day and the park was full of sunbathers and people sucking on cold beers and even colder ice creams. We saw pelicans, coots, swans with their baby cygnets, and geese. It would not be our last experience of waterfowl on our walk.

We crossed the park and reached The Mall which we followed until we reached Buckingham Palace. It's a strange part of London which sees so many tourists but very few actual Londoners. A child played in the waters of the Canadian war memorial in Green Park and we walked on a path parallel to Constitution Hill until we reached further war memorials in and around Hyde Park Corner and Duke of Wellington Place.

The Wellington Arch was built by the fantastically named Decimus Burton, who had a hand in London Zoo and much of the design of Tunbridge Wells, to celebrate British victories in the Napoleonic Wars. Nearby Aspley House (or No 1 London if you prefer) is a neo-classical pile built by Robert Adam (also responsible for the much lovelier Pulteney Bridge in Bath) for the Duke of Wellington to use as his townhouse. His place out in the country is much bigger. It's now a gallery and, this is remarkable, one I've never been in.

Once we'd entered Hyde Park we ambled steadily along the broad sand covered Rotten Row (named as Route du Roi, the route of kings, but bastardised by the English who've never been great with languages). It was built so William III could ride from Kensington Palace to St.James's Palace unhindered and, possibly due to the preponderance of highwaymen and footpads (much like Hounslow Heath), it became the first artificially lit highway in Britain. It used to be a fashionable place to ride posh nags but today's roller bladers and skateboarders prefer the smoother paths that run alongside Rotten Row.

In the Serpentine, standing proud above the leisure boats and pedalos, is Christo's new sculptural installation. A near pyramid, or mastaba, of barrels. I'll be going back for a proper look at it, and possibly be writing another blog about it, very soon but for now we just enjoyed the spectacle.

Through the trees the tower of Hyde Park Barracks poked out. A tower built, like 102 Petty France, by Basil Spence - and the one that St John-Stevas got snotty about. He wasn't the only one. AA Gill called it the ugliest building in Britain and Country Life magazine rated it number eight on a list of Britain's top ten eyesores! Attempts to list it have, perhaps unsurprisingly, so far been rejected but a quick vox pop among the walkers decreed that none of us were offended by it. Certainly the geese and fluffy goslings that stood in front of us admiring it didn't seem offended. They'd probably be more offended at being eaten by AA Gill. He seemed like the sort of man who ate geese.

Near the surprisingly lovely Princess Diana memorial (it's not a statue, but a water park that's very popular with kids) stood a statue of a heron. But on Serpentine Bridge itself stood an actual heron. Herons are always an impressive sight and this one, like many others observed recently, seemed to be posing for the benefit of the humans passing by.

Passing under the bridge took us from Hyde Park to Kensington Gardens (our fourth royal park of the day, there are eight in total - the others being Bushy, Richmond, Greenwich, and Regent's) and here the Serpentine becomes the Long Water and eventually meets the Italian Gardens.

Parakeets are normally in abundance along this stretch but there weren't many on show during our visit. Instead a Rolls Royce dispensed ice creams, people relaxed in deck chairs, fountains sprayed water into the clear blue sky creating wonderful patterns, and the whole scene really spoke of what is best about London, best about life. All that was missing was a pub.

But not for long. That train's never late. The Swan sits on the edge of the park and if all the outdoor seats were taken it didn't matter too much. We'd be spending plenty of the day out in the sun. We pulled a couple of tables up, some had chips, I took a pint of Mahou (and then a second one), and we had a nice chat as Belgium pummeled Tunisia 5-2 in the World Cup on a distant tv screen. The toilets of the pub contained an advert for a Gong and Kevin Coyne gig that finished at 3pm!

Soon we were back on our feet for the final stretch. Bishop's Bridge Road took us past Paddington station and down to the canal. Barges done up as bars, mid range chain eateries, and cyclicts all jostled for space in a good natured fashion as we made our way towards Little Venice.

Little Venice is decidedly not an area big on brutalism. Regency stucco mansions are the order of the day here and blue plaques on the Colonnade Hotel testify to it once being home to both Alan Turing and Sigmund Freud. We followed the canal past tower blocks being stripped of their cladding in the wake of the Grenfell disaster (we weren't actually far from the blackened shell of that tower block but we couldn't see it, maybe for the best) as the area went a tad more down at heel.

Still pleasant though as people sat in canalside parks or dozed on benches. Egyptian geese and goslings were still at play. Soon we reached the Trellick Tower, surely an absolute must on anyone's list of brutalist icons to see in London.

The summer breeze was making me feel fine (blowing through the jasmine of my mind) as we looked up to Erno Goldfinger's masterpiece, disappointingly wrapped in blue material and scaffolding. Ian Fleming was no fan of Goldfinger and even went so far as to name one of James Bond's chief antagonists after him. Erno Goldfinger, not Auric, was born in Budapest in 1902, a Jew who moved to Paris at the age of 21 after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Paris he fell under the influence of Le Corbusier but from the thirties onwards he spent the rest of his career in the UK after falling in love with and marrying Ursula Blackwell (heir to the Crosse & Blackwell fortune).

While Ursula was bringing out the Branston, Goldfinger was ploughing a lonely furrow by sticking with brutalism and high rises long after they'd fallen out of fashion. Trellick soon became a magnet for crime, vandalism, drugs, and prostitution but in the eighties (possibly, as Colin (resolutely not a Tory) suggested, due to Thatcher's right to buy scheme) things started improving in the tower. As they do to this day. It's now so iconic it features on mugs and was used as an ident for the London Olympics in 2012. Blur, The Verve, and, less impressively, Hard Fi used it in music videos and it featured in London Fields by Martin Amis and is said to be a key inspiration for JG Ballard's High Rise. It's now Grade II listed.

From Trellick we crossed the canal, wandered down Harrow Road and through Maida Vale until we finally reached Kilburn. This was to be our last stop and, according to Adam, I'd saved the best for last.

The Alexandra Road Estate, just off Abbey Road (but no time for any Beatles based shenanigans), was designed by Neave Brown in 1968 and completed ten years later. Brown was born in New York state in 1929 and died in January of this year. Built in the form of an ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat with the roads and parking space hidden beneath pedestrianised walkways it's a joy to walk round but is it a joy to live in?

That's impossible to know but it certainly seems to have been a new, interesting, and less imposing way to do brutalism. From the outside the back of the building may look like a giant football stadium such as the San Siro in Milan but once in the complex it's a much softer affair, helped no doubt by the copious greenery that flanks the walkways and brightens up the concrete and glass facades.

It's been used in The Sweeney, Spooks, Prime Suspect, and 28 Weeks Later and pop videos have been filmed there by Richard and Linda Thompson, Foals, The 1975, J Hus, and Kirsty MacColl. Neave Brown also built the similar Dunboyne Road Estate in Gospel Oak but we were done walking for the day and retired to the nearby Priory Tavern to raise a pint or two in memory of Neave. Colin had a 'bake' which turned out to be over priced soup so we moved on to The Old Bell for more beer, more gin, more chips, and some veggie bangers'n'mash. It was lovely to sit in the garden with good friends and feel satisfied that I'd managed to organise and execute such a splendid day out.

Thanks to Pam and Bee (for providing photos for this blog) and thanks to them, Sanda, Shep, Adam, Colin, Dena, and Neil for joining us. I'd walk these walks on my own (and I have done) but they'd be nowhere near as much fun without such great company to share the day with. On September 15th London by Foot:The Capital's Curious Circuits will be hosting Werewolves of London:A musical tour of a Strange Town and it'd be my absolute pleasure if you were to join us.