Makrolon Ornament

The illuminated Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament for those owners of a Rolls Royce who can extend their budgets a further, almost $10,000, is not made from glass but from a Bayer Chemicals patented polycarbonate called Makrolon. Those engineer-types who stop by here will be familiar with this product.

My father-in-law has just recently gone a little beserk and done something Jovian for his daughter and grandson.

I must say he has taken a lot of pressure from my own shoulders because it will now be easier for me to go to an additional ten grand for the Makrolon hood ornament.

I jest of course and I feel though, that I must explain my arrogance.

As of right this very minute, I personally, would be thieving from my own rare coin collection to as much as mount a battle to attain a Swiss-cheeseburger (at least, though, we have said 'Swiss-cheeseburger' and ought to add that it will be the Angus beef one, too).

However I have a sense of strong confidence about the future. Well, at least for my future, anyway, and I hope, for yours as well.

At heart I am a believer in the possibilities flowing from the invention of things like Makrolon, much more than I am in the possibilities offered by the political life. For I do not believe in the establishing and the building of cities for modern people – but I do believe in the exploitation of the artefacts of automaton mentality. I believe in architecture. Architecture is a rational system that bypasses or at least sidesteps the pseudo-intelligent agency of modern evolved people; today's people fit in to the architecture of cities and modern structures and dwellings, whereas they mostly all believe it is the other way around.

And money is a rational system too. And it also has architecture and this is not something our friend Ben Bernanke has sufficient an understanding of, or a deep appreciation for.

Take this very distant example of what I mean: let's say here is a great and successful Beijing identity who goes and marries some millionaire in a presumed more-liberated society. Just one step away from Communist Beijing, she marries an oligarch from, let's say, Singapore; the Beijing government is not too worried because the two societies are not that far apart politically. The order remains.

But then one day she decides she cannot any longer tolerate the egregious arrogance and disdain for the ordinary human being shown by this oligarch she has become entangled with, and she contemplates upon how that his mindset exhibits in every particular way, all the odious features of the usual wickedly privileged, and spoilt, tyrant.

So one day she throws on a tight satin Dolce & Gabbana, high heels and a pashmina wrap, and grabs her Baschmakoff purse, and walks out. And as her Rolls Royce leans in acquiescently to approach her, she angrily pulls off the million-dollar ring she is wearing and casts it down to the gutter or to the pavement somewhere, and is too exorcised to even notice the blue illuminated, glowing frosty Makrolon Spirit of Ecstasy light up its warm 'welcome in' to her very brand new and gleaming Rolls Royce Wraith, all plush inside with its doublecream-thick carpets, and soft luxury black-piped leather seats, and its excessive starlit ceiling.

Ah, you see! The elevated in station often have their own problems that serve to deny to them the ability to see and to appreciate the splendours of their lofty surroundings.

One can become highly disillusioned by staying too long there, and perceiving the banal reality behind much of the public face of power and money.

But one can also be uplifted by its intensely private side. That is to say, if you ever discover the true face of private power, and money.

Mysterious Money - where does it come from?

“Be calm... Be still.” as Nicol Williamson's Merlin says in Excalibur. “All is well.

Behold! The Dragon's Breath!”

In the mysterious smoke of the Dragon's Breath, conjured by the even-more-mysterious Merlin, a Spirit of Ecstasy glimmers, for the wise.

Money cannot afford too much banality. If it becomes banal – as Bernanke has made it – then it dies. Powerful money, on the other hand, is interesting, even fascinating, and utterly mysterious.

Learning From The Jungle

I grew up quite literally inside a tropical jungle. For whatever reasons we need not inquire into right now, I have in fact lived inside two major Malaysian jungle tracts - the first place was called Taman Endau-Rompin, and the other, Belum-Temengor.

Taman Endau-Rumpin

In those days a lot of life was much slower-paced there, as well as in many other parts of the world. There were no tv programs to rush back inside to, the sun was fairly lazy... People went on walks. I certainly did from as soon as I could walk. There were two clever house dogs that accompanied me wherever I went and they barked whenever my mother called out and afterawhile she took to trusting the dogs implicitly and that meant I could go on long walks. Which I did do. Without other people around...

Look, it was nothing for me to go wander into the jungle and stay out from mid-morning to early evening. I mean it was literally true that if the dogs barked you could hear them from a mile away echoing through the crevasses and valleys. There were no machines, no cars, no buildings, no construction sounds. On a good day you could hear the water pumps and generators of the two chinese tin miners washing out the ore-bearing sands from out of the side of a mountain-stream incline – although they were deep into the thick jungle.

I learnt many things in the jungle but one was that there are places humans can go where nothing else can. A human can see, and ajudge, and consider the changing face of risk, and make decisions based on reflected expectations and a kind of creative positive imagining of outcomes. Animals always default to their fear factor, whenever the challenge meets their threshold capability and threatens to exceed it.

A human can go into that particular notch in the rockface, look behind that particular fan of ferns, go under and behind the noisy crashing waterfall – the crocodile will not, and tiger does not. And if you climb up the rocky sides, not even the sunbasking iguana is going to be able to chase you there if it wants to. The black panther might, but it sleeps in the day, the cobra or the python or the viper might but these can be avoided or beaten off with a stick – you can see them if you keep a good eye out for them especially where you are stepping. Spiders are not too great a problem if you know to look for them and besides they don't stay in the flinty rocky wet dark anyway. A strong loping vine will take you out across a hundred foot drop and back to the exposed bright sunny side. Monkeys hang out in moving troupes and they hate fire and I have a Zippo.

The jungle is a safe place.

Modern Shanghai

Great monsoons sweep a lot of things away... I have never personally seen wild animals attack each other when they are on the run from a huge disaster. Animals are fear-based priority responders.

The human civilized world is also a very safe place. Same reasons. In the wild there are occasionally crazed animals of course, behaving crazily; same as there are crazed people in the world.

 

Here's a symbol from the modern, advanced and civilized human world. The Spirit of Ecstasy, by Charles Sykes, carries the fairytale of a secret affair behind it. All round such symbols, a crazed world swirls of course. But such symbols, and the ideas behind them, are all-important to the intelligent mind! 

Quirky People, Quirky Money

There's this quirky Australian songwriter and performer called Lisa Mitchell. She's still only young but she's been writing and performing for a long time now. Even today there are evidently still a few smart producers left in Australia and clearly these ones that work with her decided some time ago to be patient and wait for the superstar to arrive.

Lisa Mitchell's new song release 'Bless This Mess.'

Mitchell has always been a highly quirky songwriter, she's poetic rather than purely lyrical, and what she writes is not the kind of stuff you could say that you entirely expected from a pop song – and yet her material is commercial, having been used in quite a number of television video clips and product advertisements at a top professional level.

Jay-Z's 'Empire State of Mind' is a fine example of a commercial, professionally-made song that also works on many levels – except that it is also so over-produced that on one level it'll make you sick from a feeling of being manipulated into 'having to like it.' I kinda feel sorry for the artists involved – they give what seems to me a very forced performance; that they're trying extremely hard to convince even themselves to like what they are doing...

On the one hand the sales we are told Jay-Z's song made would underscore the value of its professionality. On the other hand, although the words in it say 'this town will inspire you,' it's doubtful that they will, as far as I'm concerned.

'Quirky' means employing a flourish or a twist that is not part of the normal action or behaviour that is expected.

Of course, you can be quirky and not deliver the goods though. And that's not a good thing.

Pink champagne cocktail is a
quirky little drink

In today's money world there is no 'professional/commercial/standard/conservative' way. All the 'standard' operators are making no money, and returning nothingspence to their shareholders, stakeholders, and investors. All the sovereign funds are getting a boilerplate, sponsored yield from a pressured taxpayer.

To make meaningful profits today, you will need to have a twist on the normal. You will need to distort the normal. But out of tiny little acorns great oak trees grow. So I guess I'm making a poor pun on 'quercus' the latin term for acorn, and relating the small and the unassuming and the quirky to something that is yet worth investing in patiently.

There is too much effort spent on the facade of what is 'normal' these days. Too much substance has gone missing from the normal 'commercial' product. I'd look for the quirky. 'Normal' does not like quirky, which means that quirky may still contain some substance. And that's just plain logical.