All That Glitters.

I want to tell you about the character of gold; what it is, where it comes from, and what living spirit it contains.

Some say it is cursed...

It is not cursed.

In this day, Chinese people have money that can be used in the West, and so they can exercise their desires and aspirations through the spending power of money.

I personally quite literally come from a Venetian family – that is, partly from genuine Venetian blood, and in all respects from a long long history of seafarers, adventurers, merchants, soldiers, and kings.

Murano glass everywhere...

Venice in the West, sent envoys and ambassadors and magistrates-of-trade (for that is what they were called) into China, and returned with a tie of some inner and spiritual kind, to the Great Dragon of the East.

Vast balloons floating in the still air and light breezes, were covered in lightest silk from China. Rich brocades and ornate carpets, strange food and preserved fruit, medicines, paper, scent, and skyrockets... All entered into the consciousness and experience of the Venetian people because of the influence of China; its culture, ideas, and science. And because the heart and mind of the Venetian is open to subtle influences.

We, today, in the West, look at the purchasing and ownership of gold, as quite definitely a means to make money, as its price rises, in a huge bull market. We know that never was there a time when it was absolutely without worth at all, but we see it recently having risen so quickly, and, those of us who are also bulls in this golden market, hope that it will continue to do so sufficient to make us a good profit quickly.

Those who doubt the point of it all, might adopt the position of sellers, and hope that its price will fall like everything else in the deflationary conditions of the global economy today.

Two things are necessary and vital to understanding where the price of gold might go from here and when it will do so: an understanding of the spirit of Chinese higher culture, and a conception about whether or not and at what intervals the Chinese Central Government will allow its currency to appreciate now and then against the rubbish of the rest of the world that is passed off for money.

There is a traditional Chinese classical piece of music called 'Jasmine Flower.' You can easily see and hear it being played on YouTube. Listen to this, and think about whether the classical Chinese mind would buy gold for a profit – or, only for a profit. And then when you next go down to your gold mint, or gold seller, buy some like a Chinese person might think about doing, if he or she has just come into some money - after they have bought and eaten a bowl of noodles, bought a new shirt, a piece of fruit, a bolt of silk, the horse racing tips for next week's races... A billion people are buying alongside you. Mayhaps too they will also have more spending power than they did the week before. Of course gold is very beautiful. And it's also very smart a thing to have. The Venetians powdered it and burned it in glass to make a special type of red-coloured glass. They, by hiding their wealth thus convinced thieves by such means that they were only wine drinkers afterall and fibbers, and not anywhere near as rich as people said. The future price of something walks around today wearing a mask. It is Venice once again. Every lie hides a truth. And frankly I'd rather have the pockets of my cloak lined with real gold coins than with real receipts from the vendors and brokers of Buffett's 'Mr. Market-never-lies' price action on everything. I just can't trust 'Mr. Market' anymore!

Gold will never die; it is the symbol of, and possesses the spirit of, truth, and eternal and universal dominion.

Calvin J. Bear

Guilt

Okay I'm feeling slightly guilty.

One of my business partners has a real thing for fast cars; I'm not all that fussed about them.

The whole world is apparently on the edge of some kind of financial precipice. Jim Rogers says let the bankrupt guys just fold – stop bailing them out. And I totally agree. But what I mean is that people are really saying things are really bad...

So... Yesterday my other business partner took me to Western Australia's best restaurant (Galileo's) and we went there at a hundred miles an hour in his 458 Italia (Ferrari, obviously).

Three bottles later of some Sicilian wine called I think Santa Cecilia, um, we took off back to his place and opened the very last bottle in existence of some kind of 'nuther red from Mount Barker.

Er, these wines were all absolutely spectacular.

I don't know much about the car ride home because the way the driving/passenger position is in the Ferrari (you sort of lie on your back with your head being the only upright thing... well kind of upright, anyway) the blood going to the back of my head and the swirl and swoosh of stuff flying by in my peripheral vision on either side meant I can't really tell you what the hell was going on – I never saw it, and don't remember much of it anyway either, really.

I'm doing a $260,000,000 Stage One project financing for a UCG and ammonium nitrate plant on a huge deep seam (non-fracing) coal resource in Queensland and I basically have a whole bunch of money from some Chinese guys whom I've never personally even met and including, I think so anyway, actually the Chinese government.

Okay things are bad apparently. Everywhere. I swear to god I have brand name banks tell me this every day these days and I don't know what to say back to them. I've never before personally been in charge of $260,000,000. Well not as far as I know or can ever remember. So I don't know what 'bad' actually might mean... Not by comparative experience or compared to the way banks must know why they are saying things are bad everywhere.

Well but they're not bad here, though.

I don't have political friends and my parents would be over 105 if they were still alive so I don't have family connections either, other than my wife's. Nobody knows me. Meaning, I am not a public figure. And maybe I never will be too. But things are certainly not bad here for me right now.

Calvin J. Bear

Hot Firecracker Ice And Silk

In Switzerland there are a few – not many, but a few – precision industrial weaving machines with the capability of creating beautiful silk fabrics with up to about fifteen different colours in the design of the fabric.

So we're talking not about printing onto the fabric various colours, but rather, weaving crystal-clear and precise patterns with different coloured silken threads. This sort of finished silk product is extremely expensive. Depending on the visual designs, some of these new silks are quite sensational.

Yet on the whole I don't like too many of these new-fangled things – well I'm talking about expensive things anyway with an old tradition to them. Sometimes more is not better. I really don't, for example, like the modern complicated styles of cutting diamonds. Yes yes I get the basic idea of so-called perfect symmetry 'hearts and arrows.' What's the other one – 'hearts on fire' or something. And there are others too. All departing through extra complication from the fully-developed American Standard 60/60 Marcel Tolkowsky cut. There's a reason for tradition and they're the ones who don't get it.

Then there is the 'Grand Complication' wristwatch thing too.

To me some of this stuff is a bit like George W.-speak: it's 'complexified' rather than really that advanced and complicated afterall.

This image is digitally rendered -
real life diamonds are much more exciting

And the same is true in the modern world of pop fashion sex idioms too: it's how much further, how much more absurd, how much more exaggerated. There is also the whole power overlay thing which to me seems all too equivalent to the current male world of politics and banking – 'waddya mean we have no clothes?! We're in charge, aren't we. You should be happy. Why aren't you happy. Do it my way. Every other way would be bad for you... And by the way, can we have another bailout?' ...The contradictions are too too numerous.

'Inability to resolve the stone's dispersive fire.' This is the key phrase to why overly-complicated cuts are wrong for diamonds. 'Inability to resolve' also includes 'imperfect or incomplete ability to resolve' – which is the result of too many facets and too many small edges, even when the stone itself is large.

D &G classic

A plain black silk cocktail dress when fitted properly is the peak of adult female elegance. A top-cut Tolkowsky brilliant is the paramount when it comes to jewelry. If you want some colour try a Russian Posad silk shawl as an accessory.

Silk gets hot when you put a little fire to it. What Prometheus really knew was to do with the fire in the ice. Let me tell you, when you get a really well-cut diamond, you turn it in the light and you can almost hear the snap crackle and pop of the dispersion: it's sharp, and hot, and snappy, not flashy. A good diamond is a firecracker, not merely a sparkler.

Hedonics Of Diamonds

People today really misunderstand the point of owning diamonds: even some big commercial organisations that are in the business of selling them – other than paying the standard lipservice that dates from another era - fail to give any kind of indication that they either really care about what they are doing, or care for the nature of the product itself. Like so many other things these days, the modern-day inheritors of other people's original achievements behave to a large extent as though they seem to actually begrudge the role they were handed along with the wealth which of course they readily took.

“Diamonds are a girl's best friend.” Well not if you go by the five investment banks that recently completely stuffed up the proposed float of Laurence Graff's diamond house. Apparently they – diamonds - are not anyone's friend at all. Not only did the banks fail to execute the supposedly planned book build, but they let slip to the market and to competitors in the process the very limited number of key clients that Graff had – no more than twenty in all. Many questions can be asked about what those investment banks were doing in conducting such a strategy that claimed a float target of a billion dollars – unnecessarily large if you couldn't be sure to make at least close to it – and wildly irresponsible to the client if in the normal exposure that occurs in a public float, sensitive and otherwise also confidential commercial information is scattered around in the breeze gratuitously when that event then becomes a failure.

And to another 'large extent' this sad tale is really testiment to the nothingness that the big brand-name investment banks have themselves become. Once proud and to-be-reckoned-with names like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, even H.S.B.C., cannot but expect to be castigated because of such a market failure (again!) of something they have tried to take to the professional financial investor. You can't make such an insane hash of something as prestigeous as a major diamondaire's public flotation and hope to maintain credibility.

And so now we're going to have to put up once again with the same old 'spin-city' peppering in the media about how diamonds are not good 'investments' and how synthetic diamonds have altered the profitability of the traditional market, and how diamonds have fallen out of favour with today's super wealthy (probably Chinese) elite. And how at the low end the ordinary consumer cannot afford them... And how the Greeks ought to pay their taxes and how austerity must prevail... Meanwhile of course, Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF pays no tax at all. Pure self-interest driven spin drivel; the whole lot of it. Welcome to today's world, though.

'Girl' is a general term; Elizabeth Taylor is a specific name.

See, the thing is – 'certain specific diamonds are certain specific girls' best friends...'

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

Hey Jesus... The Beef And Potatoes?

I just binned a fairly negative post I was going to stick up here about some nonsense the tendentious Australian media is writing about at the moment. In a nutshell though, the media is writing nonsense that is not even slightly factual: they are making false claims about something that is non-value added and straight out of the ground belonging to the Crown and that is leased to entrepreneurs, whilst forgetting about the decades of value-added profits that other people around the world have been generating and have tucked away into Swiss banks already.

But if I posted all that nasty stuff you wouldn't get to see or appreciate the wholesomeness of what truly wealthy people get up to... So... I binned it. And instead,

Yesterday, my wife took over a chicken mozambique (kind of mild curry thing) to a brilliant and very very wealthy deep coal gas engineer who lives in a mansion in the premier local suburb.

I had to warn her to tell him though, before he ate it, that there is a difference between fresh hand-ground spices and proper traditional cooking, and the commercial cooking he might have been used to from going out to commercial restaurants.

Now I watch Dr. Phil as much as any of the other several million+ of his viewers, but let me tell you, illicit drugs are dangerous but I don't think it really is true that illicit drugs are as powerful as a properly-made Tamil curry or a Mozambique chicken 'casserole.'

Well, okay though, this is how you get to eat these things with me at my place:

...firstly, it's late afternoon or evening. There are uniformed people who massage you for as long as three hours or so in the massage rooms, using myrrh and benzoin and almond oil. You wear comfortable slippers and something loose and you are taken into the dining area, which is in candle-light and the orange glow of the warming brazier. Suddenly 'Diving Faces' by Liquid Child hits up deeply on the Bose. People wear emeralds around the table.

Glass Slipper - by Louboutin

You sit in Jarrah and leather dining chairs designed by my friend Karl Teuchert (I drag him out of heaven for this) of ARTRA and someone offers you champagne. And then the food is brought in and you are served. And you get to see some novelty, or some innovation, something new, always something new...

And let me tell you, you are not going to remember much else until you wake up the next day.

See the water, wine, bread...? We are the meat & potatoes.

And another thing – this is all real stuff I'm talking about here. Ordinary cardamom seeds out of the pods, if toasted a little and mixed with cloves tops and mace shroud (fresh), in some kind of delicious food will knock your socks clean off. Try it if you don't believe me. The staff don't need to be wearing Nombre Noir or SL's R de N, but that also helps and if you are conned by me into drinking the champagne out of straws (concentrates the gasses), you won't last thirty minutes. Wealth is what it is. And it isn't money per se.

Next post, I talk about Beef Bourguignone, one of the most complex dishes to do correctly, but one of the most rewarding when done correctly.

John E. N. Ward (himself).