LOVE AND DEATH IN PARIS

I will be in Paris on Valentine's Eve  - playing with the The Real Tuesday Weld at Le Comedy Club . I am looking forward to it especially as we have already released a live album 'recorded in London on Valentine's Eve 2012,  the last night before the apocalypse'  This album was beamed back to us in a dream.  Assuming the dream was metaphorical, as many are, that the Mayans or whoever it was got it wrong and that we are still all here on the 14th, I intend to spend Valentine's day in the City of Love at Pere Lachaise  - which is of course in fact a rather wonderful City of the Dead.  


I've always associated love, death and dreams together.   I guess true love is a kind of dying (une petit morte as it were) to one's ego and hence something to be both feared and desired in equal measure.  To paraphrase Mark Twain: I have always loved life so I hope I shall love death.  That is one of the reasons we made Catherine Anyango's artwork for the aforesaid album as a real life blank Last Will and Testament form.  You can complete this for the benefit of your loved ones if you haven't done one already (most of us, unable to contemplate the idea of our demise, have not). 


Personally I find spending time thinking about my own inevitable end a useful prompt to love my friends and foes rather better.

I hope to meet you at our Paris show or perhaps at one of our shows in Gent, Brussel or Alsace that proceed it  but if I don't, above is a song on the theme at hand - it is a demo and rather ragged so forgive me for that. And, so as not to get too sentimental, here is Woody Allen on the matter:

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.” 

See you on the other side then?

TUNNELS, TELEPORTATION AND THE EXPLODED HEART

My investigations into the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi and the London teleportation system seem to have provoked some interest and have been bearing unexpected fruit.  Thanks for the messages - especially the one in heiroglyphs.

A recent correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous put me on the trail of Bonomi's sponsor the gambler and occultist Lord Kilmorey (also known as 'Black Jack' Needham).  Black Jack became infamous for eloping with Priscilla Hoste who although once his young ward, became the love of his life.  Although much younger than he, his love appears to have been reciprocated but the scandal of the affair or the strangeness of his arcane rituals (which had seen his separation from two previous wives) proved too much of a strain on her and she died. Whether she expired during one of their love rituals or not, she certainly passed on prematurely of an 'exploded heart' - cementing the reputation of Black Jack as a demon lover.

Wracked with grief and guilt at his loss, he consulted with his fellow occultist Bonomi in the hope of finding a way to re-animate the dead girl or at least to be able communicate with her.  Bonomi instructed the architect Henry Edward Kendall in the construction of an Egyptian mausoleum and covered it with heiroglyphs dedicating it to Osiris concerning the journey of the soul through the afterlife.  The mausoleum was initially constructed in Brompton Cemetery near the Courtoy tomb described beneath but extraordinarily, the whole edifice was subsequently 'moved' - first to Chertsey and then to the grounds of Gordon House in Isleworth where it stood hidden for many years.  Whether this movement was by means of horse and cart or was a successful example of Bonomi and Warner's teleportation techniques,  I leave you to decide.  

It has been speculated that the mausoleum was intended to be a 'master' teleportation chamber which somehow controlled the grid of other chambers located in each of the cemeteries which ring London.  Certainly Black Jack had a hidden tunnel built linking it to Gordon House and was said to dress in white, lay in a coffin and be wheeled by his servants through the tunnel to be left with the deceased Priscilla. Whether he did this so he could attempt to communicate with his dead love or to teleport on a discreet journey into town, who now knows?

TIME, SPACE AND THE CITY

The recent upheavals in the middle East set me thinking of the various curious ways that London has been influenced by the 'cult of Egyptology'.  For instance, along the embankment, if you look closely, you will see cast iron camels and sphinxes supporting the benches that line the river.  Such architectural influences abound.  Hawksmoor's churches are full of them - check out the strange pyramid on St George's Bloomsbury or the sombre elevation of his St Mary Woolnoth.  Both of these have the heavy psychedelic gravity of a pharoahs's tomb.  The Victorians were nuts about ancient Egypt and of course looted many of the treasures they found on their archaeological forays.  Cleopatra's needle on the embankment is probably the most prominent example and the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum are stuffed with such plunder.  

From Hawksmoor onward, various English visionaries were not only influenced by the architectural styles of ancient Egypt but also by its occult belief systems.  The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the flowering of that peculiar hybrid of science and magic which gave rise to many strange stories and characters.  I've written about one of them before - Austin Osman Spare (Phil Baker's excellent biography of the man has now been published by Strange Attractor press). And of course there were the more famous Aleister Crowley, Ouspensky, Blavatsky and the like.

An earlier Egyptologist was Joseph Bonomi - pictured above.  He traded as an archaeological artist but is thought to have been a tomb raider.  He is also generally considered to have been the designer of the Egyptian styled 'Courtoy' tomb in Brompton cemetery which was ostensibly intendd to be the final resting place of 'three spinsters'.  An interesting legend has grown up around this mausoleum because it is the only one in the cemetery for which there is no record of construction.  This, together with Bonomi's obsession with the afterlife (reflected in the heiroglyphs on the tomb), have been held by some to be evidence that it is not a tomb at all but a Time Machine and that the three spinsters, if they existed at all, were in fact his time travelling sponsors.

This is a lovely fantastical idea but unfortunately it is incorrect.

In fact the tomb is one of five 'teleportation' chambers designed by Joseph Bonomi and built by his occult partner the Clerkenwell inventor Samuel Alfred Warner.  Amongst several other inventions, Warner claimed to have developed a mysterious missile capable of destroying  ships from a distance.  The Royal Navy were convinced enough by his demonstrations to pay him to develop this new weaponry but proved unable to reproduce his results independently. This was because what Warner had allegedly discovered (with the help of ancient knowledge gained by Bonomi in Egypt) was an occult way of  'teleporting' a bomb a short distance - I suppose you could call it a 'psychic torpedo'.

The Navy withdrew funding.  Disappointed but undaunted, Warner and Bonomi found a new sponsor, Lord Kilmorey, who encouraged them to attempt to use the occult method of teleportation in a much grander but still hopefully commercial way.  They conceived of the idea of a transportation grid around London to reduce the time taken to travel the large distances of the vast, congested metropolis. To this end they built  seven Egyptian teleportation chambers in the most suitable places they could find - in each of the  seven new cemeteries that had been built in the capital from 1839.  The chamber that people mistake for a time machine in Brompton cemetery is just one of the seven and it is sadly rather dilapidated now (although it did give rise to the idea of the Tardis in the Doctor Who stories).  Whether any of them actually worked as intended is now of course a moot point.  If you like, you can go to see some of them (and try them out for yourself suppose).  The ones at Brompton, Highgate and Kensal Rise are pictured here.  

Some of the seven appear to have entirely vanished, as did Samuel Warner himself, although whether this was as a result of the normal processes of time or by becoming lost  whilst teleporting who can say? Bonomi took his secrets and his knowledge to his grave - a rather modest one  - in Brompton cemetery.

Ironically, of the several ways of now getting quickly around London, one of the ones that has become more popular is 'The Brompton' - a fold-up portable bicycle.