Return Of The Mack

My mother was on the stage. A lot of years ago of course. So many years ago only people in the theatre would have much of an idea what it was back then to be a contracted J. C. Williamson's artist.

Mark Morrison

Me, I can't dance and I can't sing. And I can't teach school either (my father was a teacher for more than forty years). Okay the truth is I saw what they both did and I figured, 'oh this isn't for me at all.' Way too much hard work. And of course the worst thing was my uncles who were seriously wealthy – one having been a director of Shell Far East. Result: money = good; altruism = silly. That's how little kids think. I still think 'doing good' is largely a thankless occupation. Hey look, at the time I knew my uncles, Shell was already far past just doing something beneficial for industry, middle class lifestyles and the developed and developing world – at the executives' level it was about playboy Malaysian tunkus, Chinese mistresses, British tailors, Aston Martins and Rileys and gullwing Mercedes sportscars, private luncheons and late late dinners with shiploads of alcohol, and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. At least it was from what I could see from hip-height (possibly the place to be to see all the action).

I suppose my only handicap in life is that I have always been fairly athletic with rather low body-fat and that means I can't do much of the alcohol thing. And thus, many people have been pretty suspicious of me. If you want to succeed in business the straightforward way, try not to encourage people being suspicious of you, I would say.

Actually in this post I was intending to focus on the stage and theatre and performance in general actually, rather than on the rich men's club stuff.

At the same time though, success in any business venture is quite similar to running a successful theatre production. And sometimes, though quite rarely, I observe in popular entertainment the fingerprints of the olden days' professional theatrical producer. I have to tell you, no one in modern politics has this quality at all. In all of the drive to mass-produce talent and garner the broadest popular appeal by standing on as few toes as possible, you end up with utter inanity.

Good theatrical producers know that every superstar talent is ideosyncratic – that's what human beings are at the top level. Individuals, different, unusual, personalities, characters... ...and difficult. Some are not difficult. But a lot are.

I was doing the hotdogs at the school sausage sizzle this week during their interschool sports carnival, when a tune came on the speaker system and one of the mothers stuck her iPhone up in the air with the Shazam App on: in fact she didn't catch the song in time and on this occasion the App didn't get the name of the pop track.

Well I happen to know the tune and it was Mark Morrison's Return Of The Mack, something from the Nineties. Mark Morrison is talent. Rare. Ideosyncratic. Not sure if he's difficult or not. Delta Goodrem – who is also talent – was up the road at a shopping centre during the same week and one of the dad's on the barbecue had a pic of her on his clone Samsung. He's a security guard. Delta Goodrem has a reputation as down-to-earth and a real nice person. All the moms and dads at the school thing said she was a 'diva' but totally without all the diva arrogance and difficult attitude. Lucky agent and producer. It's rare.

You want to see talent get onto YouTube and watch Howlin' Wolf do 'Smokestack Lightning,' or Mark Morrison do 'Return Of The Mack' or Delta Goodrem sing her latest song 'Dancing With A Broken Heart.' Goodrem's song is not raw like the work of the other two but her talent gets the thing across. And for me, I can see the handiwork of a real olden days' producer all over her video clip.

Makes much of the modern world just plain stupid. I've always felt artists, especially musicians, can pick up the trend of the near-term future extremely accurately. ...The world is not going in the direction the dumb politicians and their bureaucrat viziers might like to think that it is. In fact I tell you what; you want to make money and be at the front of the curve start thinking much much more creatively and inventively than conservative politics – which is basically the mindset of both sides.

And buckle-up. There's a ride ahead. Don't worry about money. There'll be plenty. Stop worrying about money; it isn't the problem. The problem is doubt about the avant garde. Don't doubt it though – no successful person ever did. And the public, knows talent. Just watch them stick the Shazam App up in the air to chase it. Talent... is sexy.

Financial Genius

The whole point of artistic or musical genius is that it delivers the 'artistic massage' first, and only subsequently some thinking people then tend to realise there was a serious intellectual message too.

Orgastic Love = Hand on Ass, maybe not arm in arm...

Is there such a profile available when it comes to financial genius...? What would be the equivalent? A mathematical massage? An intellectual massage? A money massage? At least it is clear what the message is – we tell you a story and then justify taking the value of your work, wealth, and efforts and handing it to someone who won't sit down and have a cup of tea with you. The vision of Stanley Fisher and Ben Bernanke walking virtually arm-in-arm at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, tells it like it is. There are hundreds of miles between me and you – and them and a bunch of armed guards.

Taking money from the citizen and from the taxpayer and continually giving it to a few privileged banks certainly creates an ethical questionmark over the purpose of a central bank like the US Federal Reserve. But of course that is unlikely to ever be addressed honestly and directly by Bernanke.

Crucially for professional private investors, assessment of economic risk nowadays falls to the question of who is 'protected' and who is not, rather than who is acting sensibly and who is acting dangerously... Can the banks and the government act sensibly at all or over the longer run? Well, let's just see for how long they can; if they are doing it even now.

The great philosopher and public intellectual Paul Ritter

Although not commonly talked about, there is such a thing as a radical pathology psychologist – or sometimes, 'radical social pathology psychologist.' You won't see much talk about such people in the ordinary media; for they are a thoroughly discredited lot you see. For instance, there is my late friend the extraordinary Paul Ritter – the architect and polymath/polyhistor who laid one of the original foundation stones at the World Trade Center. He personally knew the very thoroughly discredited psychologist and medical doctor Wilhelm Reich – who was one of those Austrian School Psychologists who more or less started all this nonsense about the establishment deliberately misleading and suppressing the masses through a steady diet of fear and crisis. Reich's main problem, it seemed to me at least, appeared to stem from the fact that he had the temerity to suggest the establishment's core dissembling nature resulted fundamentally from a sexual issue they all had! And that, as they say, was the quick end to him.

But I think that the establishment has miscalculated – or maybe even failed to calculate at all - that the internet and all it represents, is the very devil's breath itself to the common herd, because it liberates the Id of the private individual and the collective Id of his community, from the constraints and controls and social rules imposed from his political and government masters from on high. I cannot think of a single greater real test that has ever happened in history of whether Reich's style of psychoanalysis and his ideas are functionally sound or merely crackpot thoughts. Dare I say this: Reich is extremely clear about what he thinks will happen, but you will have to read his books carefully to discover what these predictions are...

And yes yes, of course I am being subserversive.

Dancing With A Broken Heart

WARNING - YOU DON'T HAVE TO AGREE WITH THIS ONE!!

Today I was confronted with a frightening fact: Anders Behring Breivik is possibly more diligently well-read than me.

I mean I am a great reader who travels far beyond the typical academic or commercial booklist review-of-books. I used to work near enough to the seriously commercial book-publishing industry to know how to find out who really sells the most books – in other words, what books real readers like as opposed to those books that the marketing department arranges the sales of!

Of course by now I'd actually forgotten that when I was an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia I once tackled a certain Prof. Maund with the complaint that the librarian was being suspiciously deceptive regarding the works of Wilhelm Reich which were supposed to be on the shelves – but which weren't. Only many many years later did I discover that a certain City Councillor – one Paul Ritter (the architect and town planner who had laid the foundation stones of the original World Trade Center) – continually 'removed' (as in purloined...) all said copies any and every time the University replaced them on the shelves by buying new copies, until eventually, they stopped buying them.

Kate Bush - wrote Reich-inspired songs

A further fact was that all of this was because of some dispute or other between Ritter and the University itself – and partly also consisting of an attempt by Ritter to get some free press about his socio-psychology ideas that were being decried by the Heritage (buildings) Council based at the University.

The fact that I was the only person who ever did actually really notice the continual disappearances of these books I guess means that popularity is not necessarily a guarantee of quality, or, that quality is a fluid idea when it comes to the written word expressing the ideas of intellectuals and that not everyone agrees on what intellectualism is.

In the past I have tried to read broadly...

But Breivik not only appears to have read broadly, but to have comprehended the significance of some of the intellectuals he has read. The conclusions he reaches are not ones that I can necessarily agree with him about – but the danger of those intellectuals is if anything, testified to by what Breivik did.

People who read along the same lines as Breivik are likely to be 1. very few in number and 2. rather intelligent to say the least.

Is James Holmes one of these? And does he also have a Manifesto out there somewhere, but one that is being presented in disguise and not presently being attributed to him? I believe there is almost a 100% chance that this is the case. I don't think either Breivik or Holmes are lunatics at all. That is, they are only lunatic if you consider Stalin to have been a lunatic, if you see what I mean. They will achieve a certain amount of their ends through the kind of determination that is, I suppose, a little crazy!

Let me show you an example of the power of people like Reich... Reich, I believe, was not the man people have assumed him to be. He has always been thought of as being both brilliant, and likely also suffering a mental disorder towards the end of his life. And that is the fatal mistake about him. Wilhelm Reich was so brilliant that he realised that to actually have the impact he desired, on the type of society and the type of person in society that he wanted to affect, he would eventually as a form of therapy have to play a lethal and probably self-fatal joke on the pathological and neurotic society in which he was living both during the era of Nazi Germany, and post that in the USA. His basic premise throughout his latter written works was that scientists had to be allowed to pursue completely erroneous paths and be permitted and indulged in pursuing virtually obvious complete failure – in order to challenge the psychological straitjacket of a political society that was severely neurotic, traumatised, and disturbed from centuries of violence that we were mistaken in assuming we had coped with without impediment to the sanity of the very system itself. He thought that by deliberately going down obviously erroneous pathways seeking discovery, we might find solutions where by going down the straitjacketed ones by this time in the pathology of society, we most certainly wouldn't at all and only prolong and promulgate ever more neurotic pathology.

I'm pretty sure he personally regarded what he was saying extremely seriously in the same way any doctor would in treating an epidemic. The other side of that coin is mass murder... Of course.

I recommend that you listen to and watch the video by Kate Bush which employs Reichian psychology – song titled 'Running Up That Hill.'

And then I recommend the extremely recent/current hit by the Australian singer Delta Goodrem – 'Dancing With A Broken Heart,' which is essentially the same idea but revisited in the modern musical idiom. Artists often know before others, what is going on. Well, maybe reflect deep feelings within parts of the society before the whole becomes fully conscious of them. Let us not forget, musicians like Wagner were always associated with the rise of Nazi Germany. We are at a distance now from Wagner -, but too close to Bush and Goodrem (pic on the right there) and the trance beat generation to realise the signs.

Calvin J. Bear

Eating In Russian Kitchens

“The Secrets of Russian Cuisine.”

This is a more elegant phrase employed by Western publishers to render a rather genteel english translation of the title of a book by East German Spymaster Markus Wolf, which was really called “Secrets of the Russian Kitchen.”

The subtle, nuanced difference, is that of the difference between a culinary art, and the results or consequences that require to be hidden, concerning what scullery maids get up to with the lord of the manor.

Personally, I'd love to categorically delineate who I think are 'the good guys' and who 'the bad.' Unfortunately of course, it is impossible to shake off those romantic myths and legends from the mindsets of the ordinary folk. I speak of myths and tales by which those who steer the course of State - exploit and manipulate the masses. The James Bond myth. The noble english lord myth. The honest policeman myth... The licence granted by the State...

A Great Russian Design

But look here, when you understand that the upper echelons of recent United Kingdom political leadership consists of mostly sunset industry moghuls – to put it at its very kindest – then you may begin to see that a huge tobacco company, for instance, is staring down the barrel of a total laying waste to the lifestyle that its bosses a long time ago became accustomed to... And that, it's entirely possible that those bosses in their social 'kitchen cabinetting' with political and even government, administrative, senior executives, asked for some leeway or relief from the rules and from the law, in order to protect their revenue and their lifestyle. And far be it from me to suggest that they might have been able to unduly influence the answers given, and/or the future policy of government!

However I have no such illusions about Russian realpolitik or at least, realforeignpolitik.

I am quite certain that Marcus Wolf had long established a system and a regime of generating, educating, or cultivating deep cover operatives who were aimed very specifically, at the very highest echelons of establishment power all around the world.

In my personal view, this establishment, asked for and got, during the Thatcher era, not a 'licence to kill,' but a 'licence to thieve...' And I further think that this misbehaviour has extended into the present climate of fear of terrorism in all its reputed forms – from home-grown nutjob to full-blown external sovereign insertions – in order to exploit this justification regarding 'saving us all from terrorists,' as the moral behind why some big players and their guided missile men, are allowed to defraud, forge, hack into, and steal from, whoever they designate as an 'open season target.'

But, as they say in the sporting world in which I sometimes dwell: "don't forget while you're thinking that you are invincible, that the other team is also going to turn up on the day and play too."

One of the very largest top echelon companies in England is Hanson PLC – a first class asset stripper that would make Mitt Romney blush. Baron Hanson partnered with a certain Lord White of Hull to form Hanson Trust originally. But – neither Hanson nor White are what I would call genuine aristocrats. There was a something-or-other of Hull, but that was long ago, before the Constable of London, Oliver Cromwell, did away with his opponents in the real aristocracy. And so all these modern this, that, and the other of so-an-so a place in England somewhere (and sometimes not even!) are all manufactured 'life peerages' handed out during Thatcher and afterward too, generally on account of massive successes in asset stripping, vast redundancies, abandonment of research and development, and grabbing their hands onto a lot of immediate CASH.

But the game of chess is slow and terribly fair.

Listen to me – I don't need anything Julian Assange has in order to kick the establishment in the balls.

Here is a picture of the young inheritor of the Hanson Empire – Robert Hanson – a wonderful fellow, highly-educated at the very best of toffy schools, wealthy beyond your, yay even YOUR dreams, and his wife the onetime Russian model Masha Markova.

Now when I say that certain people have been doing some bad stuff that involves gross illegality, I literally do mean exactly that. And sad to say, the police and the courts and government agencies and bureaucracies have protected them. Just as in the days of old Cromwell – who also, was saving the honest citizenry from the terrible misdeeds of tyrants and the unfaithful. Young Hanson is not guilty of anything that I am aware of, but I do rather think that he is now a leaky sieve, as it were, in a Russian kitchen, so to speak. Or, if not, very like unto those situations of a similar kind then that strangely enough involve some bright young thing, of very very well-trained origin. If you know what I mean.

Well, I think 'watch this space' is inadequate; I confidently predict for you, the utter demise of many once-were establishment lords and kings. And dare I say, I notice a few luxury product websites prognosticating that SINGAPORE, of all places, 'may by 2050 be the wealthiest nation on earth.' Oh, okay then. However, I always like to underscore the strong connection between London City and Singapore's oligarchic 'elite.' One falls from this sort of tree they all will fall. And that will be the end of that! The cause of my animus? Oh dear. Just stop listening to the myth-making! There is no James Bond. There has never ever been a James Bond. There is a BP, a British American Tobacco, and a Philip Morris, a Hanson Trust, and so on, though. And none of them are working for the taxpayer or the citizen. And no politician who goes along for their ride is looking after your interests. And the reason there is a banking problem today, is precisely because in stealing from everyone, the 'elite' has lost all capacity to use its brains. If Marcus Wolf were alive today, I'd be eating in his kitchen everyday. HE was the suave and cultured superspy. And HE has descendents even now.

I'm just an observer though, who once had uncles in the oil business, who left me with the luxury of being able to know a few handy names, and sit around a lot and 'read the play.'

The Silence That Falls...

Friday I have a good muslim friend of mine turn up and we have coffees, teas, even cigars maybe, and talk about good wine and blonde women, generally.
It is just past the middle of Ramadan at the moment and ye Muslime Friend - let's call him Hakim Philby - should be at the mosque. He is, however, over here.
He doesn't feel that welcome at any of the local mosques, because, unfortunately, not only is he regarded as 'Westernized' but probably corrupted by his expensive Western schooling as well. And that is not to say he is altogether understood and accepted either, by those current crops of privileged kids of African dictators and 'democratic leaders' who also went to places like Eton and Oxford and so on.

Turk's hats... in the cold snow

My friend is from a past generation.
This was the Golden Generation where money didn't mean a thing compared to principles, be they religious, moral, political or merely civic ones.
(I'm not completely sure such a generation ever really existed of course but I seem to recall that it may have...)
So... He should be fasting during the day.
Anyway, he brought over some chicken and a few odds and ends of ingredients and I went to work in my kitchen observing that both he and my wife and the next door neighbour were acting a bit like schooling sharks.
The whole mob of them were as noisy as all hell. There was a copy on the dining table of the very latest Marie Claire magazine filled to the brim with risque tales and over-skinny models and sex advice.
Nobody at my place lets me make Beef Burgundy or any of the Russian or Hungarian things that I personally like to make and eat. So I'm stuck with a sort of Tamil chicken curry and white rice with a touch of sesame oil in it. Not every Friday but well, fairly often.
I bring these two great tureens out and then all of a sudden there's this dead quiet and nobody says a word and the intensity and seriousness with which people serve themselves and get down to work eating is fascinating.

The silence - that kind of silence - is gratifying for any cook.
I'm not sure I will over a short term be able to introduce things like pickled cucumber and vodka or caviar or borscht because these things are a world apart from food you eat IN TOTAL SILENCE.
However it's very cold in places like Kiev or even Red Square often and you don't want to talk in those sorts of places unless someone absolutely insists that you do.
There is a certain pure functionality about some Russian cultural motifs, although there can be some ornateness present too.
You can see I'm doing a Russian theme at the moment. There may be a reason. In fact I'll tell you what the reason is - take the two cultures, American, and Russian, and take from out of them the best that you can find in both... ...and let's just dump all the Karl Rove, Ben Bernanke rubbish and propaganda. I'll bet there are some REAL problem areas in the Russian culture too that people there very familiar with it would also love to dispose of permanently. I'll ask my spy friend - not the Muslim guy, a different friend altogether - and let you know in another post what lunatic nonsense self-important but scene-grabbing people and ideas Russians themselves would like to do away with.
Oh yes, and there IS something going on at the Kremlin right now. You can be very sure of that. Whose side must I be on? Actually I will still be here each Friday; Mohammed and Marx can come visit anytime if they like. Well okay, maybe Tamerlane and Kruschev! I don't want to be bored!