Your Dirty Mind: Butlers... Maids... and Mistresses!

Imagine, if you will, the most amazing futuristic world and society of interesting and unusual people...

According to Charlie Sheen(!).

Imagine, if you can, the most amazing... According to Snoop Dogg.

Imagine, if you can, the most... According to Jenny McCarthy.

Imagine... According to Julia Phillips.

To Stanley Kubrik. Or to Sir John Gielgud's Hobson, the butler from 'Arthur.'

...And then reduce all these visions of these imaginary worlds to what is common to each.

It's all hypothetical, necessarily, but in the final analysis let me suggest that you will end up with two simple facts: firstly that all the individual visions save the movie butler's, are likely to be predominantly most demanding on the daily life and limb of the ordinary civilised man, or woman. And secondly, that the common parts will be those quieter, calmer elements... Of course Hobson is certainly not like any real butler I have ever known; he is a distilled fantasy of the Hollywood American mindset – US rich/Brit the learned, cultured and wise, if poor, servant. A sort of avuncular variation of that other myopic US distillation about foreign dynamics – Lenin good/Stalin bad. But Hobson serves well enough as an accessible, if flawed, leitmotif for the enduring wisdom of old money.

Thus, as with the Arthur film's Hobson the British butler, old money is not about hypermania or the anxiety of the modern zeitgeist. I fancy people must think that no one has ever in the history of Mankind encountered all the problems, issues and social pressures that they do today and that there is thus no one to consult for solutions. No written history of overcoming such things, no models of behaviour, no examples.

Old money is however, above all about the cultural and corporate and social memory of those tried and tested solutions to all the classical problems and issues that the human race has more or less always faced, down throughout its countless generations. Apart from the mythical 'Golden Age' there is otherwise always the Samsara; the eternal return, the eternal crisis – and so too the eternal resolution.

Old money is about calming down.

Though not like calming down as the old are thought to do in old age, but calming down like the calm before the storm. Knowing the solution beforehand and preparing for the wild weather to come. Desires, lusts, hungers, indulgence, opposition, threat – these are all the tumultuous, wild weather things of active living. Old money has the knowledge and power to deal with them all.

Old money opens his day with the ritual of the familiar, the comforting, the sure and the trusty, the anxiety-defeating civility of personal attenders: for the man, his barber. And for the woman, her masseur, or masseuse.

Followed by a private room and tea – or coffee – and finger food, and cakes.

And yet here too the strange, implausible and yet pregnant oracular moment which faithfully awaits a taste of some Chloe Kardashian naivité and its attendant ingenue walk-through... This is the actual tone of old money's day.

The successfully avant-garde possesses all possibilities whilst having that characteristic of the utterly reliably enduring. Enduring without fail, all of the nonsense and the heaviness and venal politics that is clutching firmly at the throat of contemporary human society and human affairs. Observing the daisy dukes from the clear window of one's private salon. One finger close to the bell ring for the messenger boy.

Ingenue... This is, of course, the 'artless girl.' Modern life creates the environment that forces too many women to be no more than artless girls - and from thence, artless women, and so, on to artless older women. Their husbands and lovers become disappointed in them. And fail to respond. And by consequence the women become resentful and frustrated. Few and rare, are the real mistresses and experts of the assignation. Yet all women could be, if they knew how. So far removed from the artless female - regardless of their looks alone - is the mistress that is the lover. The true meaning of the romantic ideal of 'mistress,' is 'not the artless female!' Thus the wife could be the mistress. The woman full of art. Cunning. Heat. Coolness. ...Haute cuisine, haute couture, haute femme. Haute amour.

This 'old money' recommends you to the music, believe it or not, of Snoop Dogg featuring Katy Perry; and to Annie Lennox's 'No More I Love You's;' and to Mango's 'Friday Coffee' - for an insight into why genuine old money is so very much the avant garde. Old money stays intact afterall because it can always handle the modern and is always looking ahead to the future. It prepares and is ever prepared. That's how it became old money in the first place. It is so self-assured.

Yours truly,

O.M.S.F.

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