Samsara - the eternal return

“Travelling forward to the past...” (A phrase from an old SAMSARA perfume advertisement.)

I must confess I was a little disconcerted when I saw Dame Stella Rimington on morning television today. She's been on and off the media over a few years now and she still seems to speak with a freshness and interest in her voice that either tells me she's been having a great retirement, or that she loves to share reminiscences about her old job as the one-time head of MI5.

And who wouldn't?! I knew this and that and I couldn't tell – and now I can. Sort of.

So we've had Germaine Greer tour through Oz just recently, and now Dame Stella. What's going on – that we should be 'graced' with these U.K. luminaries at the moment?

Dame Stella said her role at MI5 was as a protector. And she kinda said a few words about Islamic terrorists and begged off what she did about it in her time saying: hey, well, she had had her hands full with the IRA back then.

Not a spy

At least she acknowledged it wasn't exactly 'a war...' As in, 'a war on terrorism.'

I think these people are all a little naiive. Actually I am referring to the entire enclave that has had the public – especially the public of the United Kingdom by the throat since around Thatcher. In the evenings recently I've been watching Rebekah Brooks talk down both to a very senior judge as well as a quite brilliant QC. And I'm also sick of listening to Greer and hope she'll soon be consigned to a wheelchair and parked alongside that other piece of Oxford/Cambridge mischief Stephen Hawking.

Here's my question: did Dame Stella have no clue whatsoever that Rupert Murdoch was running quite the efficient little industry bugging thousands and thousands of people all over the United Kingdom all that time? Not even a tiny-teensy little clue...? Well hell boyh! MI5 screens and monitors the top cops and civil servants don't they? For gun analysts they sure as hell couldn't apparently work out the significance of the associations that were being maintained!

The top lady spy's story appears to be that one of the great capabilites of the master/lady spy from London Town is to be able to walk into a pub full of men, and strike up a conversation and extract a lot of detailed information about stuff from the unsuspecting target.

Uh-huh. Okay.

Actually I hope that Brooks doesn't get stepped on too much, go to jail and all that kind of thing. She's just doing a job for lots of dough. Same as I might, maybe, given similar circumstances, maybe. Who knows. Her boss is a crooked-minded individual who simply just doesn't realise that he is that – who's had the run of the whole place for a good long while. Enough already, Rupert!

Anyway, if they drag it all out, Rupert Murdoch will fall off the perch before Brooks is squeezed too hard. At least they've been apprehended at least. Though not by MI5, m'lud.

But notice how the media's use of Rimington has set the agenda again? Back to 'the terrorists!' And away from those right under her nose trampling over people's legal rights every day. Still. I wonder which media company publishes her books. Well, actually I don't wonder, do I.

Best Austerities,

Calvin J. Bear

Immersive Luxury

Immersive luxury. That's the current catch-phrase in the big marketing houses who do Mercedes, BMW, and all the rest of that expensive middle class trash. I think an academic name of Gilles Laurent came up with some kind of study that claimed really wealthy people, when examined as to their lifestyles and habits, spent a lot of time – in other words, were immersed – using certain items and objects that could therefore more truly define the concept of 'luxury,' compared to many other commercial products that were generally, and probably incorrectly, also given the title of luxury products. I've scanned the study itself and think that it is terribly flawed, but that hasn't stopped the manufacturers of expensive stuff exploiting the academic cachet of the phrase 'immersive luxury.'

So, according to the researchers, food, music – and basically a lot of things commanding smaller dollars per unit – were not luxury items. What utter rubbish. It takes around 18 months to properly process a vanilla bean pod – not sure how much longer these idiots want you to immerse yourself in a luxury thing, but layering your mistress's french lace panties over half a dozen bourbon vanilla beans is decadent, and having her soak her tender pink feet in vanilla pod foot-baths will draw the vanilla essential oils up through the ascending bloodstream and help you correctly identify pussy in a masked party in a dark ballroom underneath a black satin-shrouded table on a dark night with only a few tea-lights showing the way to the ends of the obfuscated tunnels...

A vanilla bean is, I believe, in fact more expensive by weight than a new Mercedes... But it doesn't take a ridiculous sum to own the experience thereof, nor utilise the value therein.

A decent sweaty martini is a very great luxury between people who know each other well enough to have martinis together with.

Okay, I like the pink diamond in this pic, I find it a touch too middle-class Sino-design centric for my own absolute taste, but now, it is expensive, but I rather doubt anyone will be immersed in it so long that it would seem like an unhealthy obsession. But it is luxury! And so is the martini, the vanilla bean, Al Pacino's espresso, Cavalli's latest fragrance edp, and any number of things some of which may be had for small money by unit of. It isn't about money. Luxury is about quality, pleasure, and passion. And knowledge. A Paul Van Dyke album is extreme luxury. If you understand it.


Best,

J.

Abducting The Cook

What do people get up to when they have few real problems?

Well, there was a thing that used to go on occasionally when I was around ten or so... Abducting of cooks. Yep. In fact there was this one particular older lady from India somewhere – though from memory I don't think she was northern Indian. She was incredibly good. She could cook dishes from absolutely anywhere but she had a few specialties for which she was absolutely famous. In fact she was unreasonably good.

Who started it all were a set of brothers and cousins who all carried the middle names of 'Roxborough.' Although their mother was from a stonkingly wealthy shipping family (not related to me however, sadly), their father shockingly insisted on making his own money as well, from doctoring or surgeoning or something of the like... The outcome was that the kids always had better toys and gadgets than the kids from all the other wealthy families with generally one stay-at-home parent. And, for some reason no one could ever fathom, they managed to have the time and patience to put together those ridiculously big and complicated Revel plastic kits of huge battle ships...

But they didn't possess the best cook.

The best cook belonged to another 'doctor family' – this time with the wife being the doctor and the husband an Oxford law and history graduate who for family reasons and politics was 'merely' a senior school teacher.

My own thrown-together mild chicken curry
from last night.

...And then one day the cook was abducted by the reprobate kids and forced to cook for them one weekend in secret when there was a gathering celebrating Churchill's birthday or Gandhi's ascension to heaven or the General Milk Company's contracting the doctors for some mercantile purpose, or something. The big families were going to have their household cooks do the honours, you see.

The whole thing was as far as I can recall both the greatest scandal and the most intrepid and successful event the country had witnessed since WWII ended. The tale of how the victim-family was invited to sample the dishes at table to see whether they could detect what was going on or not ranks as the biggest prank ever carried out in the hallowed dining rooms of the upper crust of this particular country that shall remain nameless here. I feel absolutely sure that cases of Tiger Beer were donated by the brewery beforehand so that the targeted doctor was as sozzled as possible before eating his own abducted cook's fare.

But then, it didn't end there because ransom was demanded in fact, for the cook to be returned, no one ever admitted formally to who had purloined the cook, and I am pretty sure both money changed hands, and the cook had to spend time at another household as well, that had bribed the kids to get her for a week, I think.

Oh yes wait a minute, I remember, (now) Professor Derek Llewelyn-Jones and Major Hunt of the Everest Expedition were g's-o.-h., at the dinner. Nothing to do with Gandhi or Churchill or General Milk.

Ah, those were the days. And those were the people. They don't make 'em like that any more. Well not much like that anyways.

Best, Calvin J. Bear

The Roman Pornocracy

If you are very well-read, let's not say 'educated' - it means something entirely different today to what it meant fifty years ago... Well, if you are knowledgable, the thought will occasionally occur to you that so-and-so must have access to the higher books of learning, in spite of what is commonly portrayed about them.

I ask myself, now and then, for instance, what books does Paris Hilton read? She shows, apart from the obvious things she shows, that she has some fundamental appreciation about higher culture. What that will turn out in the end to shape of her life I cannot detect, but she will likely not make certain types of mistakes that others have made who are in the spotlight and have wealth and position of some kind. I think in particular right now of Lord Black – Conrad Black – of Hollinger International, the previously quite substantial media group. And I think of Lord Black in terms of the current Lord Leveson Inquiry into the machinations of the print media in London. Oddly, at least it seems so to me, there has been no instance or indication that any of Conrad Black's newspapers were engaged in the same scandalous behaviour that Rupert Murdoch's were. How two competing participants within the same industry grouping could behave apparently so diametrically differently in their commercial practices begs the question why Conrad Black experienced so much animus against him.

No, there is no printable answer; for we are living in the last times of Rome under Nero, that is abundantly clear. There is a particular kind of stubborn stupidity in anyone believing that we are not; it is unreasonable any longer no matter how pacific you may want your equanimity to be. It's the ostrich-in-the-sand thing!

It has been all too easy for Rupert Murdoch's Octopus arms to imply mud where there wasn't any, and to have the hypothetical mud stick with tangible effect, while the strictly legally tangible stuff was dragged out in tricky courts over too many years with underlying animus driving officers of the court, frankly. Young Conrad Black was, I fear, a rich youth naiive about the sharks in the pond. He displayed his wealth too openly to too many and had too much fun, and this was of course a sin to the Puritans. Ever was it thus: Jesus was feared by the Romans to be the literal blood claimant to Caeser's family wealth and title, and at least 50-something claimants to the legal title to inheritance of James Stuart's Mint of silver coin were around the place when the self-promoting Puritan, Cromwell, stole King Charles' money.

Little that I should care though. I care for things like what Paris Hilton reads, and how Deanne Berry keeps motivated in her fitness regimes, and who the hell devised the SuitSupply of Holland's advertising campaign. As I say, we are living in those times that in Rome were called 'the Pornocracy.' And when in Rome...

Best,

Calvin J. Bear

The People Of The Labyrinth

The other day I realised that a very large number of people I have come across over the years who rank in the relatively quite well-off, tend to act in a noisily ungrateful way regarding their spouse's wealth and more or less everything else about them...! Why do they get involved, afterall, one may well ask, if they so detest their situations. You get the typical answers – chemistry at the start, wild optimism, all the apparent material benefits, and so on.

But I say! This churlish behaviour once the reality sets in.

The fact is some people are thoroughly nasty when you get right down to knowing them. Louis Theroux could do himself a great big favour by turning his cynical lens on the daily life of Rupert Murdoch, for instance – but of course, neither would he be allowed to nor does he have the guts to try.

Yet I still feel for some who enter the world of moneyed society and rather innocently become skewered on the naked rapier tips poking up all around the place there.

It is not a morally bad place. This is not what I am implying at all. But I am saying one needs to be advised about certain things: poverty closes doors that ought in any case not to be opened to too many human beings under any circumstances! Money, opens doors but it opens too many doors!

Which brings me to the continuation of my myth story from the last time – the labyrinth. The modern Western myth recounts the tale of the seven young boys and the seven young girls sent to King Minos to be sacrificied to the monster the Minotaur inside the labyrinth from out of which it was virtually impossible to escape. The victims would wander around the twists and turns ever more lost until they would suddenly make one terrible turn into the waiting Minotaur who would kill them and literally eat them. The ships that subsequently returned to Athens would hoist a black sail of mourning.

However this is not the story certain Greek families tell. For a start I have to tell you that the word 'labyrinth' has a particular meaning that is not transmitted commonly today. Yet, in some parts of modern Sicily, they still preserve the doorways to certain shrines said to have been built by Daedelus, the architect of the original labyrinth, and upon which there are carved mazes and symbols that have some reference to that famous legend – or myth, if you like. Daedelus retired to old age in Sicily, as you know. Like Plato also did later on. Labyrinth, is a word which means 'two leaved,' and is mostly rendered to be a metaphor of the two-leaved axe that was supposed to be favoured by warriors and used in sacred rituals around the time of the mythical King Minos. But this story is actually about the two leaves on the sides of the outer vagina. People commonly have supposed the 'two leaves' to be about the dual halves of the puzzle 'labyrinth,' but it is about the types of doors and doorways at the beginning and inside the segments of the unicurved maze, and it is especially about the symbolism and psychology of sex – about which the rite of the labyrinth is in fact actually concerned.

And so, I shall extenuate my explanation and now advance to quote a little of the Roman Pliny, about the ancient mythical city of Minos, namely that it had sacred, rich, and wonderful palaces of 'many doors and galleries which mislead the visitor.'

So do not think that all who lead lives of extreme wealth spend all of their time generously tolerating the simple, or the unlearned, or the noisy nouveau riche, and welcome them into their inner sanctums where they can easily trample unrestrained all over olde wealth culture and cause mischief and mayhem. The world today, by one reason and another, even has such uncouth people trampling around in very high places, in dictatorships, at the head of large corporations, very especially in the media, and in churches and open democratic politics as well.

At a certain time, the gods will destroy such antics. First, societies use rituals properly, and retain an understanding of their proper meaning and purpose, and then, when there is degeneracy, and people lose the meaning of their culture, there is eventual destruction. One cannot grab and hang onto power and money because of brute force and selfish ignorance and stubbornness. Well, that is to say, one can – until something happens to you. The point of the Noah story is that one can and prudently ought to build a safe haven against the deluge caused by divine displeasure, and that one can and ought to hand-pick who and what is allowed in. For me I suppose, it is just a matter of whimsy really, that I quite like the fashion stance of the Dutch fashion House 'People Of The Labyrinths.' All the same, there is a great meaning behind such myths and stories, and advisedly such things are well-recommended to those who would step into the real world of old wealth and aristocracy. I shall not be talking about the Dutch men's clothing group 'Suit Supply' just for the moment... But you might look them up to get an idea about it!

Regards,

Calvin J. Bear