The Instrument And The Formula

“...The young scholar stumbles his way along and unsuspecting, falls into the deva maze. Unseen hands support him as, in a daze, he wanders further and deeper within. Wild and unknown flora reclaim their territory and overhead, the Monsoon thunders and heavy tropical rain crashes down in a deluge everywhere in the outside world.”

Having from a very early age encountered great masters in different fields and quickly having realised that they were nothing at all like the simplistic public facades and images presented that were mostly the ways they were known to the majority of the public – it is now not something I find all that unusual for me personally, that is, to accept an uncommon juxtaposition of certain things otherwise taken for granted, as I am about to expound on for you here now.

(Pic: Iggy Pop performing Johhny O'Keefe's 'Wild One.')

It is a fact, that on the two separate occasions I attended lectures given by Johnny O'Keefe (a globally-influential rock and roll star of the Fifties and Sixties) it was he, in fact, who introduced names such as Truman Capote and Frederick Matthias Alexander to me. He spoke of those people in connection with a movement centered in California - which included followers such as Aldous Huxley - that taught various techniques and ideas enabling artists and performers to project themselves to a large audience. He never stressed personal self-expression that much, rather, his claim was that it was all a question of using physical energy and connecting that energy up through the crowd via rhythm and music. I clearly recall him saying that his American agent, Lee Gordon, challenged him to build his (eventual) famous audience high energy level, initially from a few hundred working class people, tired and worn out from a long week, and unlikely naturally to have anything left to give to 'audience participation' of any positive nature. It is worth some passing note that a Prime Minister of Australia – Paul Keating – was also a music performers' agent in the same Balmain streets at one time slightly later on...

A relative of Johnny O'Keefe's, Andrew O'Keefe, is today a very successful and well-known Australian television and media personality who sometimes is called upon to relate what his impression of the great 'JOK' is or was. And he is retiring in the way he speaks of him and understandably for modern audiences underscores the 'fast life' aspect that is also one of the downsides of the particular kind of fame that JOK had.

If you look at a Youtube video clip of JOK performing something like 'Shout' and observe the girls and women screaming and the incredibly intense performance from O'Keefe, whichever way you look at it, it is hardly something highly intellectual. Mistake. O'Keefe was an erudite, highly-intelligent, and very self-analytical person whose performances were all strictly 'by design.' He knew what he was doing. There would be very few people alive in the world today who actually knew back then or know even now that about Johnny O'Keefe. To inspire cycnical, sceptical, tired, working people to give up so much energy is a scientific feat of no small proportion.

There is so much available on every subject today via the internet, but to me it seems not merely 'only' commentary, but mostly superficial coverage passed off on many occasions as 'the actual essence of the thing itself.'

In the next upload, I intend to render an example of something I learned from other musical masters, this time from India and the Far East, and something quite esoteric and also rather ancient. It will not be just commentary, but a practical functioning exercise and understanding of a 'mantra' or 'magical' formula. Well let's not say magical, but rather, mysterious. And, it will produce an effect. I don't think I can explain adequately via a website everything Johnny O'Keefe explained in person about the real and actual mechanisms behind engaging a large rock and roll audience, but I think I will be able to communicate more tangibly the nature of the next subject, which exposes and juxtaposes the genuine underlying hidden aspects of what is generally only superficially known, even to the mass audiences of the actual culture and location from which it comes – that is, specifically in terms of location at least, from Rajasthan, in North India.

Exotic Chicks

Back to my new eBook for a moment, now out through Barnes & Noble online and published through the excellent Smashwords. Its full title is: 'A Digital Kumquat. Exotic Hyper-Sexual Psychodynamics For Bored Rich People.'

Psychodynamics... Now what does that mean?

It just means the subconscious forces that move us, that secretly make us react in certain ways to things, or that make us (or allow us to) have an inner emotional involvement with people or things.

Exotic psychodynamics. Well now I suppose this might be a phrase that can mean to imply some sort of strange subconscious forces - or, it could mean very unusual ways in which we might be able to influence our own inner, hidden, thoughts and subconscious processes.

A lot of recent and contemporary Western academic or mainstream philosophical tradition – or fashions of thinking, let's say - makes much of 'science' and logical or objective congitive choice and decision. In a twist of that, modern American West Coast 'pop psychology' and 'pop philosophy' tries to create an attractive fusion of Eastern and Western ideas and regularly comes up with variations of 'The Secret,' which is really only the latest in a line of magical thinking fads – a bit like the 'ideas version' of yo-yos and hula hoops. Both the apparently 'logical' and the 'fusion' approaches deny the hidden biases humans often have deep in the subconscious territories of their mind: the supposedly logical is often hiding a state of denial of self, and the 'fusion' is often no more than ludicrous wishful thinking bordering on unrestrained fantasy.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced 'chick sent me high...' and why not!) is a very serious, also very mainstream, and I would say a very great modern psychologist whose ideas centre on something called positive psychology. This is an optimal experience state or condition for people, wherein they feel as if everything is flowing for them. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter, and the experience itself (of the activity) is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great costs, just for the sake of doing it. When they are thus fully immersed, their energy is focused, and they feel a full involvement and success in the process of the activity.

(The pic is 'Kronsteen' in 'From Russia With Love'...A bit of a psychologist trope, really).

This idea stands in contrast to something like 'The Secret,' in which a certain 'wish-fulfilling' actual material outcome or object gained, is the ultimate or even the fundamental aim.

Optimal experience states, or the positive psychology approach, are methodologies of intelligent action that are able to be systematically carried out using extremely mainstream psychology techniques, and even 'entrained' in a subject, or by an individual devising and conducting such a plan for themselves.

'The Secret' is unlikely to produce any empirical results of actual success. Whereas Csikszentmihalyi's optimal experience states through positive psychology certainly will, and with the collateral positive consequences that go along with things when there is 'positive psychology' at play: physical well-being and organic benefits, radical stress reduction, and improved personal relationships. There is nothing magical about it, other than the impression it gives that it is magical. Material success is a guaranteed eventual result of such sustained performance and experience states, however. And that is why all the top sports coaches and athletes have always stressed the psychology-side of things, and the current highest knowledge - the 'leading edge' – of these understandings and undertakings is in the area of Csikszentmihalyi's positive psychology optimal experience states.

In my eBook “A Digital Kumquat” I detail through a fictionalised story, techniques and devices of the very latest kinds that are used in very high circles today to exploit Csikszentmihalyi's research for a variety of purposes. Some of which are indeed extremely, exotic.

Regards to All,

Incognito 2011

The Winters Of Their Discontent

Okay a couple of people emailed me privately to ask – on account of the last paragraph of the last blog post here - did I maybe know something beforehand about the recently announced death of Kim Jong Il.

Yes there were some rumours around regarding the ailing health of not one, but 'several dictators' who were in some way also associated with China. I have some vintage champagne cellaring for the two I'm thinking about - two of the most malefic personas that have ever walked the stage of 'big politics.' I fear however that they will abide with us for a little longer.

But enough of such dismal stuff. And on to something more uplifting.

How does 'old money' get to be 'old?' And why is it important?

People have faced challenges regularly throughout history, challenges which shatter favourite illusions, and call into question the value of the prevailing knowledge – at the particular time - of how to solve such challenges. Fortunes are usually totally wiped out during those phases as previously well-to-do and establishment figures use up their wealth just to stay alive as the long winters of their discontent rages on towards their final destinations. Those who have ways and means of surviving with something left still intact after the winter darkness has retired – tend to possess the most ancient familial memories about life and how things really are. In other words, they have the experience to handle the challenges.

Maybe the world will encounter, new, as-yet never-before-seen, challenges? Maybe. But I find the challenges before us today, and those that I have read about in history books, and those that have been recounted to me by others who lived through them, all of a piece.

If I ever pulled the budget together to do a big film, I would be working from an ideal fantasy I have about being able to cast those intriguing, even somewhat prickly, actor/characters who rarely all appear on the world's stage at the same time. I would love to cast Klaus Kinski, alongside Marlene Dietrich, alongside John Malkovich, alongside Charlize Theron alongside... ...I dunno, there's so many; but you get what I mean.

Every one of these movie identities actually had a real life that reeked with drama and by now, legend. Klaus Kinski was a case in point, of someone, who managed to survive the most atrocious environment, and come out a magnetic, austerely philosophic, some say of course, also mad person. Not too many people today remember when Klaus was the sex god, really, of Europe. His real life was XXX-rated before there was such a film classification. Certainly, again, some say this was all a stunt for publicity. But I don't think so. I think it was pretty real.

I was once invited to go to that famous Davos Economic Conference thingy. Lots of two-bit millionaires get asked to go, and back in the day when I was one, I also got asked. But I did not go. At the time, I didn't quite get what the point was, although even then it was clear to me from the types who were going, that this was to be another elitist stunt about to be practiced on a gullible world.

Actually I did go nearby to Davos. Not far up the road to a place where lazy rich people like me (well not like me because they were a whole helluva lot richer!) went to play around each winter. Here are some pictures of the place. And this is still where I get my information from today.

Bettcha anything you like, that the types at this place are not going to go short throughout the coming euro-zone winter of every politician's and mainstream banker's discontent.

Calvin J. Bear

The Rienzi Overture

Is it possible for a work of art to be a life-changing experience?

How is it possible? 

Richard Wagner's Rienzi (pronouned 'Ree/on/zee' by the upper classes, btw, and not 'Ry/en/zee') Overture, widely-regarded as very beautiful music, is of course also forever notorious as the piece that Adolf Hitler said was the cause of everything, the source that motivated him to put into action previously vague plans.

Nicola Di Rienzi was a certain gentleman who lived at the time of the Italian poet Petrarch, and who overthrew the effete aristocracy of the day and successively won and then lost rulership of Rome. His story, for whatever reason, had already become romanticized even by the time Wagner himself further added his gleam to it.

Wikipedia goes on at great length, in its discussion about Stanley Kubrick's “Eyes Wide Shut” (why the hell am I going on about this movie in this blog all the time?!!) about Kubrick's references to anti-semitism in this film. I don't see them being there prominently myself – even when I look for them. However I do fancy I hear the Rienzi Overture drifting in and out of the piano music... And that would be interesting if correct. It is subtle, but I suspect it is indeed there – and there on purpose too. (The pic on the left is by Einar Einarsson Kvaran, and appears on the Wikipedia entry.)

I find commentary that Kubrick speaks out against anti-semitism in his movies as utterly crass. He does no such thing. Kubrick is doing what so many normal people also do, and that is appreciate things as they are and as they exist on their own merits. Under virtually every Youtube clip of the Rienzi Overture or Movement there is argument this way and that about the Hitler/Nazi connection to this piece of music and most ordinary music lovers rightly complain about making such connections.

Oh yes but of course there is a style that defines the 'Germanic' ideal. I can't explain why it is so. As far as so much of the commentary, review and argument goes, about these sorts of things that you see so much of all over the internet – even including so-called 'conspiracy theory-thinking' – it's all so predictable, you can see it all coming from a mile away...

Delusional thinking comes in many forms. You can't make money being deluded, and you can't hold onto stuff that you have grabbed from others when you slip into a state of self-delusion. But empires can fall when they are in the state of deluding themselves into believing there is never an adequate opposition, and money moves from those who take it for granted, to those who know how to control the delusions it brings with it.

Death comes to all on the face of the earth. Three things will happen in the next two years: old dictators will face their own death from old age, old politicians will face their own death from old age, and the public will begin to follow nascent delusions. These things are certain and cannot be altered.

Calvin J. Bear

An eBook That Won't Let You down

A DIGITAL KUMQUAT (Smashwords Edition eBook)

I have to tell you, that most of the time I simply do things for my own satisfaction. I had no idea, really, that quite so many eReaders are being bought and used by people around the world as independent statistics appear to show. There are, apparently, upwards of 13 million eReaders actively downloading material in the USA alone. I wish I could buy some shares into any company that actually shows revenues from such outstanding product sales!

Okay so I wrote an eBook. The reason I started to write one originally was because of a discussion I was having with a brother-in-law in the London-based big box office movie industry. (He's known for one really big film that I do like a lot. It's a romantic sort of ensemble piece. You'll know it. Sort of Christmas-y... I won't say what it is. But I will say that one of the characters in it he based on his younger brother, who took off firstly to Spain and then to Australia, and was a bit of a gormless twit, really. ...Married my big sister.)

Actually it took him bloody years and years to finally produce – he'd had the script since at least the Seventies!

Anyway, rather than detail for him, point-by-point, the incredibly huge literary references that someone like Kubrick (yes, I know, my favourite these days) uses in his films, I decided to go over the top and write something completely modern and up-to-the-minute – a story, something fictional - as if the theoretical reader was as well-versed in the references as any literary criminal genius.... Basically to kick his brains in about what he just plain didn't know so that he would stop arguing with me.

Half way down the track I realized well hell, anyone can just look up all the big words and obscure names on Google, and by the time they'd read the whole book they'd be pretty well educated in the highest of high-brow senses of the term!!

Trust me. If you sent me a dollar for every word and every name you thought you'd heard of and yet still had to look up you'd be looking at a good few thousand dollars by the time you got to the end. Don't bet on yourself here, my friend, you're really not yet as across it all as I am. YET. But I have hopes for you. And don't forget, I had advantages – big money family background, big European aristocrats. I certainly haven't turned out to be a world political leader, that's for sure. But I know stuff. Stuff you will have to look up, and that's whether you're a Nobel winner or not. I'm ahead of you; trust me.

Now look, there's a few other things I should say – I'm not so stupid as to think people will read anything dead dull and boring though.

On another website right now I think I'm getting into trouble saying that my mother wrote “A Clockwork Orange.” But... I'm thinking of asking my friend who lives in Switzerland to register on this blogspot here – her grandfather was the lawyer who sued Burgess on my mother's behalf and forced him to remove all references to her either in that book, or any attribution to her outside of it. There are many people who know what happened. Wikipedia does not. Or at least it skirts around the issue a little.

My book, is called “A Digital Kumquat” subtitled, “Exotic Hyper-Sexual Psychodynamics For Bored Rich People, and revealing for the first time publicly, The Samarkandian Wonderfruit Sex Confection.”

It's published, or channelled or whatever you call it, through the excellent Smashwords. Some of it can be downloaded for free and the whole thing is $4.99

It's on Smashwords' Premium Catalogue for “Adult Books,” and is available for download in virtually all eReader and PDF formats.

Happy Reading to all 13 million of you out there!

Calvin J. Bear