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!

A Marvelous Sky

Last weekend I played once again in a band just for one gig.

And only one song.

It's a real simple basic tune that I took on – The Long Winters' 'Sky Is Open.'

You can hear their original version on YouTube.

No one over here knows this song; it's never been played on the radio here.

What I like about the tune and the way The Long Winters perform it is the clear vocals and the fairly standard English diction of the singer in spite of a touch of Canadian accent in there.

I've more or less lost most of my Ultra-British accent that I grew up with, having lived in Australasia for quite a few years now. I think I'll have to remedy that though, as modern Australian/Australasian is a peculiar, clipped, slack-dictioned, sorry thing... Well I think so.

New PRS Guitar

The guitar part in the song is also extremely easy to play. Now I can manage a pretty difficult range of techniques on this instrument – in fact my Dad called me Paganini all the way up from a small child and I think he thought that like him (that is, my old man, not Paganini!) I might one day take up the violin properly. But I never did. I think though at some point he may have thought I really was Paganini too. Who knows, I may have been in a former life. But I am not now and I don't play publicly anymore although at one time I played in ski resorts all over Austria with fairly big-time professional session and side musos who ski-ed off-tour and played in the nightclubs apres ski.

I'll tell you how good I was – I played joint lead guitar in a jazz band whose drummer, Glenn Walsh, went on to hit the skins on tour for Stevie Wonder in Sydney. There ya go.

Anyhow... 'The Sky Is Open,' is a song currently being considered as the theme for a potential Hollywood big budget flick featuring Marvel's Ms. Marvel. I don't think it'll ever get made though. They've even slated the tremendous New Zealand director Mike Takahori or whatever his name is (he directed the last of the good Bond movies Die Another Day). Ms. Marvel is riddled with complications as far as sexuality and a dark comic book history that won't go away no matter how much spinning goes down the marketing tunnel here.

Me, I'm happy to lust over a new Pernambuco-necked, Maple-topped, PRS guitar, play tunes just for my own self-indulgence, and think about whether it would be fun getting a Sunbeam Alpine or Tiger from somewhere and fully restoring it. This was the first car James Bond ever drove in the movies by the way. But you already know that.

Charlize Theron CANNOT play Ms. M.

Madonna... Could. You mightn't think so but if you go back to her being directed by Traktor Films in the video clip of the song Die Another Day you realize just how amazingly good at action pieces she really is.

Hollywood will likely screw up this job just like it has everything else recently. Even Julia Roberts could do this role. But not, NOT Charlize Theron.

All these people getting too old? No, I don't think so. Hollywood can halt time. Shame it just can't go back to when there were real producers there though.

The Art Of Modern Finance

I can't say this is new to me; I have encountered it many times before, especially during the late Eighties and early Nineties, when I worked for a brilliant Sydney Merchant Banker by the name of Jurisic long since retired. There were a lot of brilliant people around the place in those days: I recall one of the most fascinating individuals I have ever met - Karl Teuchert - the woodcraftsman and designer who designed a large amount of the furniture on which Federal Senators in Australia sit. He was a man full of energy and passion and extremely generous with his knowledge of materials to all those who sought him out. Karl worked almost exclusively with an Australian hardwood known as Jarrah, which is similar to the rare and expensive American Cocobolo.

But I digress – slightly.

A beautiful pic unconnected to the gun debate

I am driving at making the point that today it is extremely rare to find someone, anyone -, who, knowing a great deal about their subject matter, will care to divulge a lot of that knowledge fluidly.

It is simply far too difficult to keep the commercial value of any specialised knowledge intact once that knowledge is allowed to drift unescorted out 'into the wild' as it were.

The banker Jurisic owned a small boutique investments house, and Teuchert owned two fairly large craft workshops in which he employed about thirty highly talented craftspeople. Both of them could supply virtually completely unique products to a high-end and individualistic market that was not able to source the same things elsewhere. And, more to the point, this 'high-end' market was not prepared at the time to be satisfied with substitutes of a lesser quality and standard.

One just has to say, however, that it is now moot if the China market produces knock-offs of a lesser quality anymore. Sad to say but true, Chinese film directors make substantially better movies than anyone in Hollywood, e-Readers are cheaper and better if you buy them from the back-alleys in Hong Kong, and space shots launched from inside China are safer than anything Morton Thiokol or TRW ever did. This will not last. But it might go on for a thousand years yet before 'it doesn't last,' if you gather what I mean.

Anyway, back to my first sentence. I recently had the experience, once again, of watching a group of intelligent people turn to water in the face of the serious prospect of actually making big money now. Far easier, apparently, was it for them to spend a lot of money going around the whole world visiting people in high places just to hear those mysterious 'yes, yes, yesses,' which really meant 'no.' Unlike the Eighties though, today, there is only the one single rare diamond that you will find once in your lifetime, rather than being able to walk up the road a little ways to cast an unhurried eye over all the other diamonds singing much similar tunes. And the one single rare diamond has forsooth even a spirit being within, which moves and lives and thinks – just like those fabled stones in the Garden of Aladdin.

To possess such a stone one must employ a young thin lad, who can easily fit down that Underworld Entrance through which no fat, well-fed and watered, modern Middle Class merchant can go.

There is much in that sentence, no doubt, and it is by no means a terminal statement. But what is absolutely certain, and sure, and true, is that the means and the mechanisms and pathways to financing, of both the high and of the low kind, may be found quite possibly only in the minds of strange sorcerers claiming to be the long lost brother of your lately deceased and much beloved father... The thrill and the magic of financing important things is – and quite possibly always has been – a secret knowledge, and an art.

Back when I was a callow youth (never was exactly that, though), then, and even now, there is this strange holiness and religiosity about finance that many many people have; it is a thing which is given to you apparently, and to you alone, especially, and above many others, because you are worthy, and you do things in a certain prescribed way that others do not. It is in so many ways a blessing adorning the worthy alone, by the gods of money.

Whereas of course it is not anything of those things. It is simply a person knowing where money is and where it flows inside a dark cavern into which few go and thus where one might still get some before a thousand hungry gnats swarm in to steal it all and to make of yet another cool and fertile place an arid desert patch. As they do. And I fear that those who are survivors in arid places are symbiotic creatures of those gnats. They seem to be in every place that has a want of necessary and adequate funding. And to me, at least, they seem to have a special relationship with gnats.