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.

Blessings In Disguise

In modern times there are stereotypes about Crazy Charlie, the reprobate uncle, or Aunt Jane the self-medicating schizophrenic chief executive of a Wall Street financial services contractor.

Alas, I have neither of those types anywhere near or in my recent family history or recalled past. And to underscore the seriousness of the Left-Handed tale I am about to recount, I might just add that my own father's aunt was Gertrude Bell. Without whom no such place as the House of Saud would today likely exist at all.

A Blessing, in Disguise, though
following the Left-Handed Path

I could, I suppose end right here and all would be well. But that is of course not my style.

Witnessing Dick Cheney's recent Fox interview in which he mentions the Hezb e Islamia organisation, I nearly decided to break my largely self-imposed silence on this topic, that begun on the morning of this year's Boston Marathon – but I have thought better of it, and shall steer away from disturbing and fruitless complaining about what little the powerful people who claim to be well-informed, really know.

I was blessed by having uncles who were not only exceedingly well-travelled, but deeply – very deeply learned in many cultures and languages. The two of them were both involved in global oil.

The Arabic or let's say Middle Eastern culture in a megalithic sense contains many popular ideas – all of which are entirely wrong when it comes to an accurate explanation of what the sources and actual meanings of these popular ideas are, even in the mouths of local people who are nevertheless not within the inner circles of the initiated. Thus, many ideas come to the West already in a mixed-up state.

In this post I propose to enlighten you on the reality of the Djinn, and how to employ them properly.

Now take for example Christina Aguilera (picture of her on the right, below) who sang the song "Genie in a bottle." She looks tall in this pic but she is in fact really quite a tiny thing in RL. She might be a kind of an embodied genie. And there are a lot of them around the place. Like all the Qin, they are mostly Asiatic.

"Genie in a bottle"

Created from smokeless flame, they exist as structures of sub-atomic particles, and wax and wane according to the strength of an IDEA. The metaphor of the 'smokeless flame' comes from ideas being either like or actually, a form of smokeless flame – an electricity, an energy – that can burn, like a fire.

They are intelligent and because of their general longevity many possess an accumulation of means. They can move backwards and forwards in time, and if a thing 'has not happened' in the future, they are unaware of it; if they are aware of a thing, it means it MUST 'have happened.' Or, in other words, that it will happen, and more to the point, if you can but encourage a genie to think about something in particular, then they will start to work on it diligently at once not faltering until it 'happens' in present reality. And since they have means and can manouevre in time itself, they can bring about the thing's occurrence quickly.

To organise the support of a real genie, you must have a strong idea – one that is logical and possible in reality, and preferably innovative, and because ideas themselves are the breath of life for such creatures, they are attracted to good and strong ideas particularly and may arrange their many means in support of your prosecution of a very good idea. And the idea need not be morally good to be able to recruit their support.

In Sufi Mysticism, the Universal Oneness of intelligent being, implies that the maxim that 'God' simply says 'Be, and a thing Is' is also an expression of the actions, ways, and means of the sub-atomic electric world of the Djinn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGUiQ1_IR9s

The Sufi phrase is 'Kun Faaya Kun.' I have pointed your way now to a great mysterious and magical song by an exceptional modern musician AR Rahman which is nothing less than an actual Sufi Mantram disguised in a Bollywood pop song.

Now if you think you know anything about Middle Eastern religious beliefs, I am about to direct you also to some Moroccan Sufi Chanters – who are singing what we here in the West know as the English Christmas song 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.' (Edit. Added: well, the music is known in the West as Handel's Antioch - aka Joy To World - but the words approximate the former mentioned Christmas Carol). Salafists, who are creating all the grist to Kissinger's mill, are slightly confused about their own history...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M__pR8a-Sfk

And therein, I suppose, lies the rub.

Lie To Me

I THINK EVERY ECONOMIC COMMENTATOR OF ANY KIND OUGHT TO SAY WHAT MUSIC HE OR SHE LISTENS TO...

It would give you a stark perspective from which to ajudge their mind culture.

For this post I shall give you three that I listen to for your own consideration about what it can all mean or imply:

(You can see them all on YouTube).

Lola Astanova – Rachmaninov's Movement Musicaux Opus 16 # 5.

Above and Beyond pres. OceanLab – 'If I could Fly.'

Three Drives – 'Letting You Go' Greece 2000 (Dabruck Klein Vocal Radio Edit).

It's from the last of these that the following words occur:

“You can say what you want to/Cry me a river if you need to/Go put my name in a tattoo/and you can spin me lies if they come true...”

The last line has complex possible meanings and I approve of it. The problem with 'Jesting Pilate' is that he never stayed around to hear the answer to his infamous question.

The name of the game in the financial media today appears to be the spouting of data to justify a prognostication. I have a view that the G30 itself essentially consists of manufactured credentialists, driven from a long time ago by strong and powerful political elites in countries where democratic transparency has never existed – let's be kind and say: 'never properly existed...'

Nobody is prepared to contradict the 'data' and the spun versions of economic ground truth (as Rumsfeld might say) from groups or people speaking from the platform of G30 membership.

The fifteen seconds of fame and the mantle of the fifteen-second 'wise guru' that is the reward of the damned souls of economic limbo and tv-land virtual reality, includes all of the members of the G30.

To put it simply, my own view is that right now, they have no clue. And it's not a good idea to steer your course by anything they might say.

Certainly they have massive effects on markets of all kinds from moment to moment daily, but that is the same thing as the falling man claiming to be flying as he drops past the 12^th floor of a 13 storey building. Actuality, is critically a different version of the facts.

All of us who are actual professional investors of some kind, whether on behalf of official funds, or privately, must of necessity go back and consult our own waypoints of investing – that is, we must consult our own actual records of what we did, when, and for how much, and examine these in light of actual results. And this is relieved of the dictats of clever and manipulative prognosticants.

Having largely made my own personal biggest plays in the go-go era of the mid to late Eighties, and having necessarily been acutely aware of the types of mindsets abroad at the time, I often told the less experienced not to swing the words integrity and credibility around too much; for one thing I always feared those who made too big a thing about these qualities, and quietly questioned why they did it. For myself, these things are absolute givens and not subject to serious question. Full stop.

A businessman with this suit has integrity.
Soros gets close, which is good enough.

It's certainly not that I have changed my mind now or my view of things or the principles involved, it's just that I can't see modern era politicians and bankers in any other position than one which must be experiencing a sense of vertigo that they cannot admit to having. There is no ground under them, and there are no safe holds for them. The Dow is at great heights and sales and profits are under great question. Circulation velocity is anaemic and the notion of austerity matched to spectacularly unrealistic interest rates and simpering, keening, prognostications about economic growth abound in the mouths of everyone from Stanley Fischer to Bernanke to Dimon and/or Levin.

Notably Soros and Faber and Rogers and the rest of the private investor old guard are saying something else quite different again.

Currently the Yen via Japanese Government Bonds is adjusting what performances can be expected over the short run from Japanese corporates. I expect a phase of stunning and amazing superficial technology presentings to be brought about by the monetary policy currently being unfolded in Japan.

When taking serious market positions I personally tend not to go by particular views about the future, but rather, I structure or 'wind-in' a set of positions based on the immediately obtaining dynamics of the situation.

Mansory Maserati - definitely NOT the banker's version
of Punxutawney Phil's hutch!
Stockbrokers with integrity drive this car.

Thus, if I were to utilise positive revenues from equity upside positioning (adopting what is currently being claimed as the relatively attractive 'equity risk premium') then I would certainly also be positioning myself in low dollar priced long-dated Calls.

I have never been more confident of the directional pull of the existing dynamic tensions. And because of it I am most unlikely to go around making predictions or prognostications about the future or the outcome of markets' trajectories! There is no way I would want to alter what is being offered cheaply right now, just because I happen to have some kind of mathematical calculation that, if seen, would cause Bernanke's carefully-trimmed bearded jaw to drop and Fischer to look for a hole deep down Jackson way to crawl into. Which is where he belongs in the first place. A kind of Punxsutawney Phil of the financial world.

Calvin J. Bear

Hot Chillies, Hot Money

With very many things in this life, words and their meanings have a great significance on the likely outcomes of any venture! Stick a really hot chilli in your mouth and YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN IN THE PAIN AND DISCOMFORT! Doesn't matter what the public egging-on conned you to try.

Take the phrase 'precious metals.' Precious to whom? To the guy who wants to sell it to get cash money? To the obsessed person who wants to horde it?

It's part of this typical modern generalised nomenclature that means just about anything anybody wants it to mean! 'The precious metals markets...' What is that? I don't know.

Whenever gold does a sudden backwards summersault, the top end advisers bring out this idea that well, it only ever was insurance against some kind of cataclysmic event in the paper currency world – and of course, everyone knows that you have to pay for insurance, and the small percentage of time during which the gold price was down is how you 'pay for that insurance' overall. Or some variation on that argument.

The important thing to watch for is if ever there is a falling-out between members of this all-pervading global cartel of paper currency printing and political elite. Just as what happens when a rigged horse race suddenly comes unstuck for any number of possible reasons, the rich owners and powerful bookies all run for cover and get this look on their faces similar to Bruce Banner's Hulkian colour change.

Which leads me to what I really want to post about: the 'world's hottest curry...'

Ghost Pepper - world's hottest, they say...

In England, the 'world's hottest curry' idea is based around the 'world's hottest chilli' idea – which relates to what is called the 'Bhut Jolokia' ghost pepper chilli. By official accounts, this thing can rate up to six million Scovile units. Which is great and all and I have seen the YouTube video clips showing a few english lads and one famous doctor undertaking the adventure of consuming a plate of the world's hottest curry made using six of these super hot chillies.

Now I grew up in a kitchen full of Tamilian people who knew stuff from days of yore. Everybody who cooks traditionally, using chillies, knows that as soon as you cook them, you tone down the heat. Not that I am rubbishing what these english fellows are saying or doing – just that you can get a curry up to even higher (if you want to do that) heights of 'chilli power!'

Bhut Jolokia chillies are firstly, not the hottest chillies in the world – but there is absolutely no way that I am going to say which are – DHS might prevent people from acquiring them. Any of the really super hot chillies – Jolokias, Nai bird's eye, even certain Scotch Bonnets, are so potent that the steam off them will blind you if you get too close to the plants when the chillies are ripening in hot sun. And by the way, I don't tell lies here so if you check up about it you will find that what I am saying is the plain truth. The steam alone, will burn your eyes badly, and you won't be able to see properly for a day at least. Police and military pepper spray is not significantly more potent than what you can extract from a Bhut Jolokia.

However people – including the police – are confusing the effects of capsaicin, with other compounds that produce the longer term burning sensations when you actually ingest certain 'hot' natural substances. What produces the truly hottest HOT curry, is the combined effects of ginger and black pepper. Whilst in the case of chillies, odorant (smell) compounds from off chillies produce a sensation of pungency so strong when in combination with the capsaicin in the chilli, that you can think the experience is overwhelmingly burning.

But, simple though it sounds, putting too much ginger in a curry together with fresh ground black pepper, will utterly destroy the eater in a way that will send that person to hospital. Adding real fresh uncooked Jolokia chillies after you have cooked the curry and are ready to serve it, will produce an odorant gas that will literally burn your face before you get the spoon to your mouth.

Of course, those who can eat a curry like a proper Indian – with your fingers and not with a fork and spoon – will not marvel as to why some Indians have very red tongues and very pink skin on the sub-liminal faces of their skin.

...And what does all of this have to do with money. W-e-ll, I'll tell you. Eating at the spiked monetary curry table of the Fed, or the ECB, is like those english lads laughing and falling about when they are testing the 'world's hottest curry.' Yes, it's hot. And no I personally would not necessarily try it. Some people say the english doctor hallucinated in the middle of his 'hottest curry' adventure, although he claims not. Hallucination, wild and exaggerated claims, and a lot of knock-about humour, is however, closely equatable with attempts of the Fed and others, to manufacture value from out of nonsense. The yardstick of value – and values – is distinctly different, from what the Fed has any brains to think about, in terms of creating and sustaining economic growth in a worthwhile society of human beings.

'Worthwhile,' and 'human,' being very key words.

Jaguar customized in Iran by designer Hossein Yekta.
No special reason for pic!

The Australian economist Ross Garnaut, who was tasked with the Australian Carbon Tax report, recently commented that central banks had been arranging the flow of low interest 'money' into economies pressured by conditions that could have led to a Depression and had thus averted such a thing (I'm freely quoting him, but it's close enough). However the thing they are required to do is arrange the flow of CREDIBILITY into governments, banks, financial ventures, stock markets, politics, and risk/reward situations. And failure to admit that THIS, is in fact THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF ALL, is going to wind up with a visitation of fate befalling all those knock-about lads pretending to know what it is all about when it comes to economics.

For if a government lacks credibility, and they resort to the power of their enforcement arms to have their way, they automatically lose the moral authority that allows them to have a government at all. We in the West have pillaged much from Ancient Greece, and have yet forgotten that the Greeks also invented anarchy. Anarchy actually simply means not having one overarching government for all and thus forcing each individual to be his own government for himself. In this situation, tell me, what is the form of money that you will be prepared to use and can rely will work for you?

Singleton's Error

Unlike too many other money arenas these days – certainly unlike the Stockmarket trading floors, any poker games or pool-halls – horse racing still affords one the opportunity of being able to watch human psychology in a financial crucible.

The biggest news in Australia and anywhere 'horse racing-land,' right now is the seemingly quite acrimonious split between one of the world's greatest horse trainers, Gai Waterhouse, and one of the world's wealthiest advertising barons, John Singleton.

The genuinely great trainer Gai Waterhouse

I'm afraid not too many people will know that Singleton's reach is certainly as far as New York and Hollywood, since his public profile is largely limited to Sydney, Australia. But then, not too many people would also know that Gai Waterhouse was once an actress in London, who appeared next to Tom Baker's Dr. Who, among a few successful productions.

Max Presenell, who in my view is also one of the world's best racing journalists, gave a fairly detailed description of what transpired at Sydney's Randwick racecourse last Saturday, and it was such a sorry tale that I am embarrassed on behalf of anything to do with Aussie horse racing to recount it completely.

Max is too nice of a man to cast any one side into deep darkness but I am driven more by what the human psychology aspects are and so, I will certainly underscore Singleton's stilted vision in the matter.

He is of course, at present complaining either that his horse More Joyous was not allowed to run on its merits, or, alternatively, that the mare shouldn't have raced that day at all and that the trainer, Waterhourse wasn't being transparent at all times about the situation due to a 'conflict of interest.'

I don't know anything about what really happened, personally. Singleton is complaining that he punted $300,000 and would have placed $600,000 on his horse but for a rumour from 'good friends' advising him that Waterhouse's son Tom Waterhouse, one of Randwick's leading bookmakers, had told friends that the horse could not win.

Wags have already commented that Tom Waterhouse doesn't have any friends. And that may be true!

However, the mare is a rising 7-year old, who has already won almost 5 million dollars under the training of Gai Waterhouse and no one that I know of who is experienced in horse racing would have suggested this mare had any chance to win this day at all no matter what else was going on.

John Singleton also says that the poor public ought to have been told before the race that the horse was experiencing some sort of issue which might have affected her running up to her best.

I feel for John. He just blew $300,000 on a racing bet and clearly he needs his head examined for a lot of things. I'm sure Disability Services Australia or some children's hospital could have shown him a good time for half this kind of money.

However, for all of us who are just as focussed on the implications of understanding the value of mercantile money that John clearly has shown, albeit with him in an excessively exuberant way – let me set a certain matter on the table:

Investing too heavily in one side of an expected financial outcome, always affects the risk/return ratio. And therein lies the lesson which may be extrapolated to parts elsewhere. And I will say just this, but I will make it perfectly clear in an upcoming post – the gold market is under this same kind of mistaken weight of dumb money right now.



Euro horse Frankel

Just as an aside, foreign horses from the UK or Europe, are ridden in a different style to the way Australian jockeys ride. These horses are very hard ridden with an idea that they are extremely robust, and often also because the ground is heavy in Europe, they lift their front legs up too high and are pounded down heavily by their riders on the firmer turf over here still using the same 'up and down' post riding - with the ultimate consequence of many a horse going lame.

 

Calvin J. Bear

Esta Tarde

“Esta tarde se me va, toca me...”

These are lyrics from a great 90's trance/dance track by Fragma, called 'Toca Me.'

No one seems to be able to agree exactly on what these words are intended to mean, but that are something like: 'as the afternoon is slipping away, touch me.'

The rest of the words are mostly in english and say – 'Let me tell-a you, I need a miracle, I need a miracle; it's more physical what I need(!)'

...I think it's completely pointless pursuing any line of idea to do with the mess the world is in right now – be it anything to do with central banks, or government economic policy, or even national security, or all those crazy ideologies that end up killing and severely injuring people. Wherever they really come from.

The Fermian was a white wine, though

One of the people I thoroughly despised when reading about him in ancient Roman history, was Sulla. And yet I believe it was some close relative of his, Faustus, I seem to recall, who managed to maintain the best vinyards throughout all the disturbed years of Sulla, and make the best wine, as legend goes, of all time – namely the Faustian Fermian.

Now I'll tell you something about wine that almost no one else knows.

Dopamine is not the neuroselector for the enjoyment of wine – even though you will read from many learned places that it is. Wine, of course, goes nowadays for extreme prices in China – even now that there is something of an economic pullback – and it is difficult for those with an ordinary budget to acquire those big name wines from France, in particular. One day, soon, or not so soon, depending on several things, but one day eventually, all those purple prose words written about wines will be made to look like the foolish things they always were.

I mean there is a huge industry of wine enjoyment, let's say wine appreciation, and no one is in a hell-bent hurry to change the basis for talking about how the human brain perceives the enjoyment of wine.

But indulge me and I will just now paint a particular picture for you, and I assure you, that by following reasonably precisely yourself, the time-line of events, and the salient sensory details described, you will suddenly find, even a bottle of sparkling water, flavoured with flower petals and castor sugar, will take on an ethereal grace...

Lili Marlenes

Lately I have taken to walking the streets around my neighbourhood, occasionally with my dog, occasionally not – but in all events, deliberately past a certain front yard that has a simply perfect lawn, and about ten rose flushes growing from their ten separate straight single stock posts, carefully cultivated and tended over the many months necessary. Even before I turn the bend in the short street, I can sense the rose scent. This is not like that pink Bulgarian rose essence that you buy in bottles – which has its own place I guess – but it is a darker though lilting, and diffuse on the breeze, hint of something both mysterious and possibly miraculous, and not easy to grasp.

Here's a line from out of a great piece of literature by Arturo Perez Reverta: 'like a hummingbird, money is fast, fascinating, elusive...'

Like the scent of these Lili Marlene roses.

You must, simply must, imbibe a great wine in very special surroundings. And you must wait, at the very minimum forty minutes before letting a drop touch your lips when you have opened the vessel. Whether it is the unique and magnificent Seppeltsfield 100 year old Para – which is Australia's most expensive wine, not the Penfold's Grange Hermitage, by the way – or a 200 year old Tokaji, and you know what, if at all possible, you must either give a bit of it to someone else, or best of all, have another person give you the wine specially.

You might not be able to have music especially playing for you, but you will at least try to imagine it. Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov. And for those very adventurous among us – Lauge: Sandslottet.

And at around 1:44 on the adventurous music track, you will begin to feel a bit strange.

Of course it depends on how clear your neuralnet pathways are, and how used they are to these kinds of experiences, but by 4.50, chemicals in the wine will commence their effects. It's not all about the alcohol either. And here's one of the key secrets – alcohol's effect on brain perceptions is that it moves the temporal signals around, sometimes inverting the wavesignals, sometimes altering the beat-pattern, with the potential effect, but not always (which is why sometimes, experiences seem less 'interesting,') of binaurality. Alcohol does more than just affect the physiology; it affects the electro-chemical nerve signals.

And if you are daring enough to program something like Sysyphe's 'Sinking' next, you will certainly know all about it later!

New Currencies

My kid's music teacher was very impressed when I mouthed off a few things I knew about the main eras in musical composition. A few days after that she came up to me and asked if I could write something for her that she could use in her class.

Basically, I had mentioned simple stuff like that there was a time when the piano keyboard had fewer keys, and that the Romantic era followed from the end of the Wars with Napoleon and was about people becoming sick of the destruction and misery of war and turning to happier themes.

One interesting thing though is that a lot of musical styles followed particular economic migration: the Baroque proceeded from the economic power of navigation and the enhanced trading that occurred thereby. The Portuguese held navigation maps as secrets of state, and the word 'baroque' is a Portuguese word to do with their excessively lavish embellishments of pearls with gold ornamentation all of which was enabled by the wealth their map-making brought them.

A Portuguese Musician

A further detail is that composers possessed valuable things more than just their music alone – because the paper on which they wrote down the note scores was always very expensive bank ledger stock, and this was valuable in its own right, and could be sold whether it had notes on it or not!

When you look at what might constitute new forms of currency, you must consider that art and the quality of artefact, has almost as much to do with enshrining value in people's minds as anything else. A lot of people make the mistake of continually thinking during a major economic decline that absolutely nobody has money but that is completely incorrect. And then you have to realise that people who do have money in a general decline typically start to really prize preservation of all kinds. And that, for instance, is who buys tiny little, yet historically-important, and also very beautiful, things of extremely dense value such as the 1924 Australian sixpenny coin. Bankers, economic criminal masterminds, retired corrupt bureaucrats – all those kinds of people. The New Age movement often asks 'why do bad things happen to good people?' But I ask things like, 'can good money come from bad people?' Or, 'do bad people know what good and beautiful things are?'

Eighty thousand dollars

I say all of this just as things to think about, as we enter the time when new currencies are indeed developing in the wider marketplace. But they are most unlikely to be the ones which currently appear to have captivated the attention of the media...

Ornamentation

Ornamentation is a strange word. Originally, the word's roots implied something to do with 'equipment' – as in the equipment of an armed person.

Today, the word is used to describe something about the image of a thing, and even tends to imply a practically functionless aspect but one which nevertheless has aesthetic value.

If you look at some of the rarest of Stradivarius violins, they have ornamentation crafted into the beautiful wood – and at some level, the ornamentation is almost a vital symbol of the high quality of the instrument and its crafted structure.

An ornamented Stradivarius

This year, there may be a release of a current in post-production movie called 'Paganini – the Devil's Musician.'

No matter what real history says, this additional embellishment about the musician and composer regarding his having sold his soul to the devil to procure his skill and talent will no doubt persist on and on until everyone on the planet can't help but add this piece of folklore to the package each time they think about the composer in question.

It's a bit like the folkloric phrase 'and on the third day he rose...' These words are not in the Gospels at all. But that is not the common popular opinion of the matter.

All the same it's incredibly difficult to get someone to follow extremely 'complex arguments' and by this I mean not just expressions of words, but also expressions through art, and painting, film, and music, and even prose. I find it's quite difficult to get a modern person to listen with high consciousness to possibly the most ideologically complicated piece ever written of Russian music – Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. From about halfway through you will recognize the melody that begins there, from its having been used in a good half a dozen of the most dramatic romantic films. It takes a trained ear to really get the point of this piece, even though superficially almost anyone can pick up its apparent romantic aspect.

And technique is almost meaningless with these things – a lot of people play Paganini but few do it properly, and even those who achieve the acclaim of critics and classical music experts, in my estimation regularly fall wide of the mark as far as interpreting what Paganini was actually driving at. If you want to see what Paganini was really about then one of the best exponents of this particular music is the rock guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen. His playing of Paganini's 4^th Concerto for guitar – especially in some of his older recordings – will give you a good idea. But then too you also have to notice the important effect of the drums and rhythm section and what these two are doing in the piece to make the entire whole understandable to the listener. Most other interpretations at least in my view – and including those renditions by even the best trained classical musicians – completely miss the intended cadence and thus the underlying motion - and melody, such as it is. And this has the effect of an appearance of pyrotechnics and is otherwise, as far as the actual 'music' goes, completely incomprehensible and utterly confused.

Rachmaninoff 'got' Paganini because you can see how he lifts the musical punchline up and up through complicated spirals like a musical wrought iron gothic staircase.

Mostarda - Italian candied fruit, contain mustard essence!
But scientists think they know...
how Stradivarius violins were made.

In a day and age when the traditional symbols of power, wealth, and status are being constantly destroyed through the relentless triumph of economic vandalism and crass ignorance, it may not be such a bad thing to be merely 'ornamented.' Or that is to say, presenting oneself as though 'merely for ornamental effect.' ...Practically functionless, non-confrontational, non-threatening, unarmed, and a pacifist. You are thus, not a target. Stradivarii and Guarnerii have survived to this day without losing 40 or 60 per cent of themselves along the way because of the greed and lust and covetousness of the wicked and the evil.

The great question is, my friends, just what is it that today possesses a similar quality of manufacture and characteristics of subtle value?

Strawberries Romanoff!

The mainstream press is circulating a story about the Bolshoi Ballet in recent times throwing parties for Russian oligarchs at which leading danceurs have been told that it was expected that they were sexually accessible to the rich supporters of the ballet. Recent past identities from the ballet company itself are quoted as saying that mainly it was the corps that were told to have sex with the oligarch-type people, but also leading danceurs were sometimes 'on offer.'

Reading these reports I noticed the 'backgrounding' of the report sources, that they were dancers who were fighting a weight issue, or that they were not able to really stay at the demanding heights of dance.

Oligarch's personal transport - and inside having Strawberries Romanoff

I believe that once or twice I have posted on people like Nureyev, and the 'style' of the great dance companies and their people. The problem I have with the mainstream press nowadays is that they are culturally illiterate. When a great artiste carries off a performance, just the one time, and it is seen by a decent crowd of knowledgeable people, it really doesn't matter after that what happens with their weight or their attitude or even entire whole rest of their life. Just to have been able ever, to reach that special height, is testament to all the work and the skill and the talent, as well as the training and support given by other special people. Nothing else ever matters; just that one time counts.

If the press is referring to Anastasia Volochkova, and I understand they are, then what I can say from personal knowledge is that she certainly attained the truly great performance level.

There has always been an undercurrent of sexual moral hazard in the endeavour. And what is of greatest concern, frankly, is when the lesser performer is chosen above the better one for any unworthy reason. Very good danceurs have strong and important careers beyond injury or other barriers, as teachers and choreographers. You see, if Lance Armstrong had the problem of sexual misstep, it wouldn't prevent him necessarily from being able to impart sound knowledge of cycling; as it stands though he clearly knows nothing of advantage that he could impart about cycling. Volochkova is no second-rate loser like Armstrong is.

It is entirely possible that two things are true at the same time: someone, somewhere along the line, encouraged danceurs to sleep with rich patrons of the ballet, and the ballerina(s) who are now being quoted about this were dropped because they didn't go along with the proposition(ing). But it is entirely unnecessary to say these tell-all ballerinas are now being commercially-driven and that they were in fact not good enough dancers to make it at the highest level. The world of professional ballet is very large and very well-found (an English phrase meaning 'has lots of support') and being weightier is not any kind of real problem in fact. Volochkova is, and was, a very good dancer, and I don't think she ever was that overweight, personally. The fact is there are too many today who are unhealthily, and badly, underweight. Bolshoi in the past never had too many extraordinarily thin dancers – I think of Ulanova, for instance, the template of the Bolshoi lead female, really. There were many tall thin female dancers who were tall and thin by genetics – but today, it's all about some weirdo pop-magazine idiom of the stick-person.

The nature of high culture is this – if you are wrong, sooner or later you will fall into the dustbin of history. If any ballet company is picking dancers exclusively because of their willingness to put out, then they will rapidly advance into oblivion. Every impressario of any experience knows how to adjust his troupe for the ingenui, and the ice queen or the militant virgin, and the ultra carnal... Nureyev's problem, so we are often told, was that he willingly slept around too much. Much to producers' torments.

Actual Strawberries Romanoff

'Strawberries Romanoff' was hijacked by a Hollywood pretend-Russian aristocrat restauranteur. But he did it well and everybody loved the guy and the 'fake' name he pinned on an Escoffier recipe has stuck. Besides, anything Russian is white and red like ice-cream and cherries. There's nothing actually that fake about Strawberries Romanoff; it is something from Hollywood – a place where things are made up in precise ways to convey entertainments about people places and things.

There is nothing bad about sex mixed up in ballet society. It is morally wrong for the managers to imply to someone that they will not advance in the company without sleeping with certain of the patrons. Er, but it is morally wrong like Strawberries Romanoff are actually anything to do with Russian strawberries. And therefore my point is that it is unnecessary for the media to suggest that people like Volochkova had weight problems or weren't good enough. Not only is she telling the truth but she was an excellent dancer who did not have weight problems and very likely ran foul of some bad producer or manager. Any good manager would have merely offered up another more amenable lamb to the sacrifice. And any oligarch who demanded 'but I must have that one or the deal is off' is just being a child.

Also, actual Strawberries Romanoff

Egos are an issue, yes, of course. But then so what? Volochkova had/has an ego, the company manager has an ego, the oligarch has both an ego and dramatically-large amounts of money. You mix it all up: Strawberries Romanoff!

The standard recipe for Strawberries Romanoff is refrigerated Grand Marnier-soaked strawberries, a little orange juice, a fine dust of sugar, and vanilla ice-cream. But a better modern recipe that few know about is to have the strawberries soaked in botrytis-effected wine instead of the Grand Marnier. The result is a quantum leap advance in flavour on the original recipe.

Personally, the question I would hypothetically pose in an article to a hypothetical modern era Bolshoi producer or manager is 'if Lindsey Vonn were a dancer, could she make it in your ballet production?'

Calling Andy Garcia

Some of you here have read stuff that I have been posting from a long long ways back now – and you know, that long before anyone else said Osama bin Laden (or whatever the real name of this identity was...) was in Pakistan, you know that I said it.

You know it.

And sooner or later you knew that I would be pointing out something once again that more or less was er, ahead of the publicly-known information.

1.Andy Garcia - celebrity, good man, Ocean's Eleven actor. 2. Don't know...

Drifting in and out of some of my conversations here have been my occasional references to gambling, and to social clubs involving wealthy people inside of which data was being mined surreptitiously from members, and also certain networks of medical practitioners – in particular in the IVF field – that quite possibly contained scandalously criminal elements.

You may or may not recall that I have spoken of these things in the past.

Ah well, my friends in the Australian Federal Police and the various State Major Crime investigative bodies could do well to go back into their files concerning statements I had made to them not so very long ago.

Of course, in recent times the Australian Intelligence entities and the Australia Police have had fairly marginal success even with understanding simple things like Mossad stealing Australian ID's and passports and using them for launching assassinations here and there. Frankly, I'm not critiquing Mossad here – rather the spineless, gutless, under-funded and of course rather stupid Australians. They seem to have this unhappy knack of 'not knowing' anything.

James Packer

Like how it was possible for one of the world's richest men, James Packer, to be ripped off by a high roller cardplayer in one of his casinos to the tune of at least 32 million dollars. The local press is characterising it as a real life Ocean's Eleven incident.

But let me make it perfectly clear – Australia contains commercially-oriented private social clubs which are in fact organised and run by rogue elements of the British Foreign Service, in league with wealthy playboys and well-connected personages from Singapore and Indonesia, and these places are vipers' dens where conversations are bugged, brief cases are rifled through and documents copied, and covert financial scams are run against the unsuspecting.

Far be it from me to point to idiotic affairs like Rowan Gunaratne from Singapore giving advice on Tamil Terrorism to the fools in Canberra, or the fiasco about the stolen Aussie passports, or the HIH Insurance share float scam that was 'cleverly' blamed on Rodney Adler, or the crash float of now recently-bankrupted Nathan Tinkler that was run by other, more, 'clever' people in Noble Group from Hong Kong, or the stunning 'cleverness' of some young Parsee youth associated with Cisco Systems who took the ASX for a multi-million dollar ride with their simply amazing HFT programs...

No indeed.

Typical British private club items - not clues, really!

Apparently no one can see these things coming ahead, not even Alex Allen, the head of a UK Intelligence body who SOMEHOW MANAGED TO BE WORKING AS A PAID CONSULTANT TO THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN STATE GOVERNMENT, and living here while he was also the top Intelligence Officer in the United Kingdom. Apparently no one has told the Western Australian government that it is no longer part of the United Kingdom. Oh no, but these are of course all honourable men. The fact that six or seven people have dropped dead after being in this private club is apparently of little significance to the absolutely stunningly amazingly idiotic fools who run the Australian Security Intelligence agencies and the Federal Police. And these sudden deaths including, dare I say it, one particular Adam Rankin-Wilson, the relatively young and I do know, on the surface quite fit, personal lawyer of James Packer here in Western Australia.

But of course, these are all coincidences. Just like when I suggested bin Laden was almost certainly in Pakistan. Not to mention that he had also been in and out of England without anyone stopping him. Although admittedly, I use alien intelligence from UFO's and thus may have an advantage...

All the same, boys and girls of Caper Cops, let's face it, there is an old saying in Chicago – according to Ian Fleming – once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action.

I personally think the situation is already out of hand, but you know what, let's just keep waiting around until something REALLY BAD happens out of this private social club that Andy Garcia from the Ocean's series of casino scam movies has never been to as far as I know – but has his photograph displayed in.

Johnny Can't Dance



Tango dancers in a London show

“Every Saturday night when the sun goes down

Poor li'l Johnny goes down to the town

Well he can't dance, no he can't dance;

Poor Little Johnny he just can't dance.”

My mother was a professional dancer... But I don't dance at all. I may look like the great Pablo Veron if a stylist went to work, but hey, I definitely just can't dance!

A thing looks like something, but then, sometimes, it isn't what it kinda looks like it might be.

I'm the same age as Madonna. And I can fence.

Die Another Day

The song above is a New Orleans song about Jean Lafitte the pirate – the point is, he can dance; he's just not allowed to go into town as who he really is and dance in his identifiable way and get found out.

I'm doing – have been - doing my best to steer away from some of the depressing stories unfolding all around us. Shane Todd's death in Singapore is something that is very disappointing to me. But it is something about which I have decided to leave to the Financial Times and a small handful of decent reporters to cover and they have been doing a tremendous job. I mean, let's face it, if governments want to bury stuff and hide stuff, even Jean Lafitte would have a hard time dancing - that is to say, if he didn't feel he could dance to the miserable tune being forced upon him.

Myself, I am independent and I have gold hidden down in the bayou, but today, I'm not celebrating with any of it. I don't feel like dancing.

But then too, I remind myself of the film short called 'Milonga' in which a patient old man conspires with an Italian waiter to assist – I'm not too sure – either himself at a younger age, or his daughter, to get with the future love of their life in some apocryphal tango salon somewhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=P6JYeEcxnUU#t=53s

The reason there is a strong connection between wine and the gods is because good wine gets better over a long time – and some wine, over the longer the better.

Madge and Tony Ward and Debbie

Johnny (can't dance) Ward

But those of you who have been here watching for a long time now, will realise that if Johnny says get off the dance floor it's probably time to prepare to duck for the flying bullets as well.

The truly great Pablo Veron

Miracles Of Life

Okay there's Danica Patrick. And there's now also Lauren Stojackovic. She's the 30 year-old female (very 'mature age' for an apprentice!) apprentice jockey who just won the million-dollar Blue Diamond Stakes which is the richest Australian race for Two-Year Old Race Horses. And it was an outstanding, and a clever ride, notwithstanding the horse is a champion.

I have to admit I've been 'riding' this horse for several months now and I always believed that it could, and would, win the Blue Diamond.

Stojackovic on Miracles Of Life

Perhaps you are someone who cares neither about diamonds nor race horses but if you have an open mind let me explain very briefly a few things:

There are horse and then there are HORSES! Same goes for diamonds too. Today there are too many tricks and simulants and fakes and there are also drugged athletes and (there is) cheating at sports. All that kind of thing frankly takes away the inherent thrill and excitement in rare and unique performances. A diamond - a cut diamond - is a performance; the way the edges throw fire and the way the crystal ricochets light is how the diamond 'performs' after it has been through an artist's and an engineer's hands.

There were tears aplenty at the race track today. The rider's father was on course and he couldn't stop himself as his daughter flew across the line in front. The trainer was a battling virtual unknown against some of the world's best international trainers.

A natural, mined blue diamond;
can't get this out of a test-tube

And the horse is rather small...

And that's about the only diminutive thing I can say about this thoroughbred. One thing you should know about all race horses is that they get their speed from the mother's side (what's called the dam's side) and this particular animal's mother was by one of Australia's greatest ever speedsters - Rory's Jester. Rory's Jester is one of the top three or four all-time greatest sprinters in Australian racing history. It was a brutally efficient, undefeatable hulk, although a show-pony style of reddish blonde-coloured thing.

And this modern version 'Miracles Of Life' looks visually similar and destroyed her rivals today in the same contemptuous manner, racing up to the leaders authoritatively at the final bend and muscling ahead and then blasting away into the pages of illustrious history. This is a great horse. The jockey is reported to have whispered to the horse just before the start that there was about a minute for them now between being a really good horse and a truly great horse.

If you know anything about horse racing then you know that race horses think, and feel, and have a warrior spirit and enormous courage and incredible will to run fast and a generous pride in winning which they share with everyone who cares about them.

Okay you might not have the same sentiment about horse racing and the animals and all of that racing folklore - not everyone is into this game... But you can't know about life unless you know things that are somewhat similar - peculiar, almost unscientific, sentimental things that seem to defy logic. Except they never ever do. People just don't want to believe reality, however; they are so hell bent on defining the world in some way they think will be able to be put in a test tube no matter what.

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

That Colourless Stone

Someone walks into a big empty shop – there's nothing on the walls, very limited furniture, smooth neat bare stone floor, a little bit of light coming through a single not-too-large window pane.

In the centre of the room is a four foot high plinth with a small square of cream-coloured ceramic tile set in it like a kind of a built-in serving plate.

In the middle of this serving plate square of plain, cream-coloured ceramic tile, sits a single rather small colourless chunk of crystal much like a little translucent rock.

What are the feelings, the ranges of emotion, that rush or flow through the visitor?

Most likely absolutely none!

Cynics say that diamonds are all about the marketing. Which can also be a way of saying that in the absence of other things that connect with the crystal to render its meaningfulness to the observer, and in the absence of specific context, the thing itself has little or no intrinisic function, and otherwise might even have little or no intrinsic value either.

And I think Western jewellery shops make that kind of mistake – they tend to have this austere, almost brutalist and stark style about them, which is to do with contemporary ideas about architecture; but I feel this does not serve the expression of what diamonds are about too well at all.

Inside the Chow Tai Fook store, HK

However in Asia, particularly in Far East Asia and also specifically in Hong Kong and modern China too, the whole style of diamond vending shops is characteristically very different to the style that obtains in diamond shops of the West. And personally I find I can only buy a diamond in a Chinese diamond store or one which is similarly arranged. Even in South Africa where I spend time regularly and know one or two authentic diamondaires, the feel of the diamond galleries tends a little toward the Western style. Let me describe to you the difference between the two:

You walk into a Chinese jeweller and you are greeted by rows and rows of glass cabinets at waist-height stocked with rings and bangles and necklaces and loose stones too - though mainly just rings – all winking out and reflecting light from the powerful downlights and cabinet lights that are simply everywhere. The whole place is hot and bright. And from here you are swept away into the Aladdin story, really, because it consists of first noticing one fantastic, bright and enchanting stone, only to be thrown into confusion upon next seeing another, even as much as five times more attractive than that first. And on and on it goes and eventually you find yourself being taken up into the heights of glittering expense and even to a kind of selfish, ego-driven Luciferian grandeur. If money is no object to you, there is almost no limit to the hubris which you can indulge in by simply paying for it. But that is really about the moral dubiousness of money itself though.

Well, I can't tell you that there is an absolute rule that you must only ever buy a 1 carat or greater D IF with an exceptionally-good aesthetic cut quality...

I can tell you whatever personal scheming reason you have for buying a diamond is in fact the only truly significant thing you should think about as you make a purchase: sitting with a very well-groomed woman in a slightly darkened dinner room in which there are other rich and self-important people, it will benefit you to have a diamond on your friend somewhere visible that possesses a lot of scintillation and grabs the squinting eyes of the big-headed. If that's what you want to do. Nowadays of course diamonds are worn in all sorts of places; not necessarily only those visible ones...

Ultra wealthy people in history have bought or acquired enormous and otherwise fairly stupid stones all of which carry some folkloric aspect with them wherever they go – and mostly they went underground somewhere along the line among very very very private people. I have a piece of the old Sancy but therein hangs a tale and I certainly wouldn't admit to such a thing publicly, so here, I am telling you a lie of course...

But I like to go to Chinese shops to buy diamonds. I like to see just what an amazing diversity of mindsets there can be, and I like to use the diversity of the small colourless stones as symbols of the myriad biases and prejudices that can almost insanely grip the minds of individuals and force them even to part with significant money as responses to mere folklore, nonsense, and otherwise virtual nothingness imbued with 'brilliance dispersion and scintillation' through manufactured human complication.

The new Faberge Campaign by Mario Testino

My own fantastical biases and prejudices are not particularly odd: I imagine it is true what they say that diamonds are the only stones that reproduce sexually! To me diamonds are about money power and sex. These are things that are rarely found to be completely understood by humans anywhere, but are in fact exercised almost everywhere and rather indescriminately too by all people, and who almost universally each individually also assume they are at very minimum, the world's ultimate leading expert on these matters, and if only someone else noticed it, or if only they had but an extra ten million dollars to lord over everyone else, then no doubt the clarity of the situation would also be observed by others!

Oh boy. Only a certain sense of humour saves the human spirit from being as direly unbearable as it might often be. I don't have those 'set' jokes that go with demonstrating a sense of humour, but I sure do laugh ironically when I think about paying big money for decent diamonds – it isn't that I couldn't do it or haven't done it; it's the fact that the surrounding context and all the other stuff that goes with the scintillations in the darkened restaurant are all the rest of the necessary personal expenses to me that the salesperson isn't thinking about when they give me the steep price on the stone I'm looking at!