Singleton's Error

Unlike too many other money arenas these days – certainly unlike the Stockmarket trading floors, any poker games or pool-halls – horse racing still affords one the opportunity of being able to watch human psychology in a financial crucible.

The biggest news in Australia and anywhere 'horse racing-land,' right now is the seemingly quite acrimonious split between one of the world's greatest horse trainers, Gai Waterhouse, and one of the world's wealthiest advertising barons, John Singleton.

The genuinely great trainer Gai Waterhouse

I'm afraid not too many people will know that Singleton's reach is certainly as far as New York and Hollywood, since his public profile is largely limited to Sydney, Australia. But then, not too many people would also know that Gai Waterhouse was once an actress in London, who appeared next to Tom Baker's Dr. Who, among a few successful productions.

Max Presenell, who in my view is also one of the world's best racing journalists, gave a fairly detailed description of what transpired at Sydney's Randwick racecourse last Saturday, and it was such a sorry tale that I am embarrassed on behalf of anything to do with Aussie horse racing to recount it completely.

Max is too nice of a man to cast any one side into deep darkness but I am driven more by what the human psychology aspects are and so, I will certainly underscore Singleton's stilted vision in the matter.

He is of course, at present complaining either that his horse More Joyous was not allowed to run on its merits, or, alternatively, that the mare shouldn't have raced that day at all and that the trainer, Waterhourse wasn't being transparent at all times about the situation due to a 'conflict of interest.'

I don't know anything about what really happened, personally. Singleton is complaining that he punted $300,000 and would have placed $600,000 on his horse but for a rumour from 'good friends' advising him that Waterhouse's son Tom Waterhouse, one of Randwick's leading bookmakers, had told friends that the horse could not win.

Wags have already commented that Tom Waterhouse doesn't have any friends. And that may be true!

However, the mare is a rising 7-year old, who has already won almost 5 million dollars under the training of Gai Waterhouse and no one that I know of who is experienced in horse racing would have suggested this mare had any chance to win this day at all no matter what else was going on.

John Singleton also says that the poor public ought to have been told before the race that the horse was experiencing some sort of issue which might have affected her running up to her best.

I feel for John. He just blew $300,000 on a racing bet and clearly he needs his head examined for a lot of things. I'm sure Disability Services Australia or some children's hospital could have shown him a good time for half this kind of money.

However, for all of us who are just as focussed on the implications of understanding the value of mercantile money that John clearly has shown, albeit with him in an excessively exuberant way – let me set a certain matter on the table:

Investing too heavily in one side of an expected financial outcome, always affects the risk/return ratio. And therein lies the lesson which may be extrapolated to parts elsewhere. And I will say just this, but I will make it perfectly clear in an upcoming post – the gold market is under this same kind of mistaken weight of dumb money right now.



Euro horse Frankel

Just as an aside, foreign horses from the UK or Europe, are ridden in a different style to the way Australian jockeys ride. These horses are very hard ridden with an idea that they are extremely robust, and often also because the ground is heavy in Europe, they lift their front legs up too high and are pounded down heavily by their riders on the firmer turf over here still using the same 'up and down' post riding - with the ultimate consequence of many a horse going lame.

 

Calvin J. Bear

Esta Tarde

“Esta tarde se me va, toca me...”

These are lyrics from a great 90's trance/dance track by Fragma, called 'Toca Me.'

No one seems to be able to agree exactly on what these words are intended to mean, but that are something like: 'as the afternoon is slipping away, touch me.'

The rest of the words are mostly in english and say – 'Let me tell-a you, I need a miracle, I need a miracle; it's more physical what I need(!)'

...I think it's completely pointless pursuing any line of idea to do with the mess the world is in right now – be it anything to do with central banks, or government economic policy, or even national security, or all those crazy ideologies that end up killing and severely injuring people. Wherever they really come from.

The Fermian was a white wine, though

One of the people I thoroughly despised when reading about him in ancient Roman history, was Sulla. And yet I believe it was some close relative of his, Faustus, I seem to recall, who managed to maintain the best vinyards throughout all the disturbed years of Sulla, and make the best wine, as legend goes, of all time – namely the Faustian Fermian.

Now I'll tell you something about wine that almost no one else knows.

Dopamine is not the neuroselector for the enjoyment of wine – even though you will read from many learned places that it is. Wine, of course, goes nowadays for extreme prices in China – even now that there is something of an economic pullback – and it is difficult for those with an ordinary budget to acquire those big name wines from France, in particular. One day, soon, or not so soon, depending on several things, but one day eventually, all those purple prose words written about wines will be made to look like the foolish things they always were.

I mean there is a huge industry of wine enjoyment, let's say wine appreciation, and no one is in a hell-bent hurry to change the basis for talking about how the human brain perceives the enjoyment of wine.

But indulge me and I will just now paint a particular picture for you, and I assure you, that by following reasonably precisely yourself, the time-line of events, and the salient sensory details described, you will suddenly find, even a bottle of sparkling water, flavoured with flower petals and castor sugar, will take on an ethereal grace...

Lili Marlenes

Lately I have taken to walking the streets around my neighbourhood, occasionally with my dog, occasionally not – but in all events, deliberately past a certain front yard that has a simply perfect lawn, and about ten rose flushes growing from their ten separate straight single stock posts, carefully cultivated and tended over the many months necessary. Even before I turn the bend in the short street, I can sense the rose scent. This is not like that pink Bulgarian rose essence that you buy in bottles – which has its own place I guess – but it is a darker though lilting, and diffuse on the breeze, hint of something both mysterious and possibly miraculous, and not easy to grasp.

Here's a line from out of a great piece of literature by Arturo Perez Reverta: 'like a hummingbird, money is fast, fascinating, elusive...'

Like the scent of these Lili Marlene roses.

You must, simply must, imbibe a great wine in very special surroundings. And you must wait, at the very minimum forty minutes before letting a drop touch your lips when you have opened the vessel. Whether it is the unique and magnificent Seppeltsfield 100 year old Para – which is Australia's most expensive wine, not the Penfold's Grange Hermitage, by the way – or a 200 year old Tokaji, and you know what, if at all possible, you must either give a bit of it to someone else, or best of all, have another person give you the wine specially.

You might not be able to have music especially playing for you, but you will at least try to imagine it. Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov. And for those very adventurous among us – Lauge: Sandslottet.

And at around 1:44 on the adventurous music track, you will begin to feel a bit strange.

Of course it depends on how clear your neuralnet pathways are, and how used they are to these kinds of experiences, but by 4.50, chemicals in the wine will commence their effects. It's not all about the alcohol either. And here's one of the key secrets – alcohol's effect on brain perceptions is that it moves the temporal signals around, sometimes inverting the wavesignals, sometimes altering the beat-pattern, with the potential effect, but not always (which is why sometimes, experiences seem less 'interesting,') of binaurality. Alcohol does more than just affect the physiology; it affects the electro-chemical nerve signals.

And if you are daring enough to program something like Sysyphe's 'Sinking' next, you will certainly know all about it later!

New Currencies

My kid's music teacher was very impressed when I mouthed off a few things I knew about the main eras in musical composition. A few days after that she came up to me and asked if I could write something for her that she could use in her class.

Basically, I had mentioned simple stuff like that there was a time when the piano keyboard had fewer keys, and that the Romantic era followed from the end of the Wars with Napoleon and was about people becoming sick of the destruction and misery of war and turning to happier themes.

One interesting thing though is that a lot of musical styles followed particular economic migration: the Baroque proceeded from the economic power of navigation and the enhanced trading that occurred thereby. The Portuguese held navigation maps as secrets of state, and the word 'baroque' is a Portuguese word to do with their excessively lavish embellishments of pearls with gold ornamentation all of which was enabled by the wealth their map-making brought them.

A Portuguese Musician

A further detail is that composers possessed valuable things more than just their music alone – because the paper on which they wrote down the note scores was always very expensive bank ledger stock, and this was valuable in its own right, and could be sold whether it had notes on it or not!

When you look at what might constitute new forms of currency, you must consider that art and the quality of artefact, has almost as much to do with enshrining value in people's minds as anything else. A lot of people make the mistake of continually thinking during a major economic decline that absolutely nobody has money but that is completely incorrect. And then you have to realise that people who do have money in a general decline typically start to really prize preservation of all kinds. And that, for instance, is who buys tiny little, yet historically-important, and also very beautiful, things of extremely dense value such as the 1924 Australian sixpenny coin. Bankers, economic criminal masterminds, retired corrupt bureaucrats – all those kinds of people. The New Age movement often asks 'why do bad things happen to good people?' But I ask things like, 'can good money come from bad people?' Or, 'do bad people know what good and beautiful things are?'

Eighty thousand dollars

I say all of this just as things to think about, as we enter the time when new currencies are indeed developing in the wider marketplace. But they are most unlikely to be the ones which currently appear to have captivated the attention of the media...

Ornamentation

Ornamentation is a strange word. Originally, the word's roots implied something to do with 'equipment' – as in the equipment of an armed person.

Today, the word is used to describe something about the image of a thing, and even tends to imply a practically functionless aspect but one which nevertheless has aesthetic value.

If you look at some of the rarest of Stradivarius violins, they have ornamentation crafted into the beautiful wood – and at some level, the ornamentation is almost a vital symbol of the high quality of the instrument and its crafted structure.

An ornamented Stradivarius

This year, there may be a release of a current in post-production movie called 'Paganini – the Devil's Musician.'

No matter what real history says, this additional embellishment about the musician and composer regarding his having sold his soul to the devil to procure his skill and talent will no doubt persist on and on until everyone on the planet can't help but add this piece of folklore to the package each time they think about the composer in question.

It's a bit like the folkloric phrase 'and on the third day he rose...' These words are not in the Gospels at all. But that is not the common popular opinion of the matter.

All the same it's incredibly difficult to get someone to follow extremely 'complex arguments' and by this I mean not just expressions of words, but also expressions through art, and painting, film, and music, and even prose. I find it's quite difficult to get a modern person to listen with high consciousness to possibly the most ideologically complicated piece ever written of Russian music – Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. From about halfway through you will recognize the melody that begins there, from its having been used in a good half a dozen of the most dramatic romantic films. It takes a trained ear to really get the point of this piece, even though superficially almost anyone can pick up its apparent romantic aspect.

And technique is almost meaningless with these things – a lot of people play Paganini but few do it properly, and even those who achieve the acclaim of critics and classical music experts, in my estimation regularly fall wide of the mark as far as interpreting what Paganini was actually driving at. If you want to see what Paganini was really about then one of the best exponents of this particular music is the rock guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen. His playing of Paganini's 4^th Concerto for guitar – especially in some of his older recordings – will give you a good idea. But then too you also have to notice the important effect of the drums and rhythm section and what these two are doing in the piece to make the entire whole understandable to the listener. Most other interpretations at least in my view – and including those renditions by even the best trained classical musicians – completely miss the intended cadence and thus the underlying motion - and melody, such as it is. And this has the effect of an appearance of pyrotechnics and is otherwise, as far as the actual 'music' goes, completely incomprehensible and utterly confused.

Rachmaninoff 'got' Paganini because you can see how he lifts the musical punchline up and up through complicated spirals like a musical wrought iron gothic staircase.

Mostarda - Italian candied fruit, contain mustard essence!
But scientists think they know...
how Stradivarius violins were made.

In a day and age when the traditional symbols of power, wealth, and status are being constantly destroyed through the relentless triumph of economic vandalism and crass ignorance, it may not be such a bad thing to be merely 'ornamented.' Or that is to say, presenting oneself as though 'merely for ornamental effect.' ...Practically functionless, non-confrontational, non-threatening, unarmed, and a pacifist. You are thus, not a target. Stradivarii and Guarnerii have survived to this day without losing 40 or 60 per cent of themselves along the way because of the greed and lust and covetousness of the wicked and the evil.

The great question is, my friends, just what is it that today possesses a similar quality of manufacture and characteristics of subtle value?

Strawberries Romanoff!

The mainstream press is circulating a story about the Bolshoi Ballet in recent times throwing parties for Russian oligarchs at which leading danceurs have been told that it was expected that they were sexually accessible to the rich supporters of the ballet. Recent past identities from the ballet company itself are quoted as saying that mainly it was the corps that were told to have sex with the oligarch-type people, but also leading danceurs were sometimes 'on offer.'

Reading these reports I noticed the 'backgrounding' of the report sources, that they were dancers who were fighting a weight issue, or that they were not able to really stay at the demanding heights of dance.

Oligarch's personal transport - and inside having Strawberries Romanoff

I believe that once or twice I have posted on people like Nureyev, and the 'style' of the great dance companies and their people. The problem I have with the mainstream press nowadays is that they are culturally illiterate. When a great artiste carries off a performance, just the one time, and it is seen by a decent crowd of knowledgeable people, it really doesn't matter after that what happens with their weight or their attitude or even entire whole rest of their life. Just to have been able ever, to reach that special height, is testament to all the work and the skill and the talent, as well as the training and support given by other special people. Nothing else ever matters; just that one time counts.

If the press is referring to Anastasia Volochkova, and I understand they are, then what I can say from personal knowledge is that she certainly attained the truly great performance level.

There has always been an undercurrent of sexual moral hazard in the endeavour. And what is of greatest concern, frankly, is when the lesser performer is chosen above the better one for any unworthy reason. Very good danceurs have strong and important careers beyond injury or other barriers, as teachers and choreographers. You see, if Lance Armstrong had the problem of sexual misstep, it wouldn't prevent him necessarily from being able to impart sound knowledge of cycling; as it stands though he clearly knows nothing of advantage that he could impart about cycling. Volochkova is no second-rate loser like Armstrong is.

It is entirely possible that two things are true at the same time: someone, somewhere along the line, encouraged danceurs to sleep with rich patrons of the ballet, and the ballerina(s) who are now being quoted about this were dropped because they didn't go along with the proposition(ing). But it is entirely unnecessary to say these tell-all ballerinas are now being commercially-driven and that they were in fact not good enough dancers to make it at the highest level. The world of professional ballet is very large and very well-found (an English phrase meaning 'has lots of support') and being weightier is not any kind of real problem in fact. Volochkova is, and was, a very good dancer, and I don't think she ever was that overweight, personally. The fact is there are too many today who are unhealthily, and badly, underweight. Bolshoi in the past never had too many extraordinarily thin dancers – I think of Ulanova, for instance, the template of the Bolshoi lead female, really. There were many tall thin female dancers who were tall and thin by genetics – but today, it's all about some weirdo pop-magazine idiom of the stick-person.

The nature of high culture is this – if you are wrong, sooner or later you will fall into the dustbin of history. If any ballet company is picking dancers exclusively because of their willingness to put out, then they will rapidly advance into oblivion. Every impressario of any experience knows how to adjust his troupe for the ingenui, and the ice queen or the militant virgin, and the ultra carnal... Nureyev's problem, so we are often told, was that he willingly slept around too much. Much to producers' torments.

Actual Strawberries Romanoff

'Strawberries Romanoff' was hijacked by a Hollywood pretend-Russian aristocrat restauranteur. But he did it well and everybody loved the guy and the 'fake' name he pinned on an Escoffier recipe has stuck. Besides, anything Russian is white and red like ice-cream and cherries. There's nothing actually that fake about Strawberries Romanoff; it is something from Hollywood – a place where things are made up in precise ways to convey entertainments about people places and things.

There is nothing bad about sex mixed up in ballet society. It is morally wrong for the managers to imply to someone that they will not advance in the company without sleeping with certain of the patrons. Er, but it is morally wrong like Strawberries Romanoff are actually anything to do with Russian strawberries. And therefore my point is that it is unnecessary for the media to suggest that people like Volochkova had weight problems or weren't good enough. Not only is she telling the truth but she was an excellent dancer who did not have weight problems and very likely ran foul of some bad producer or manager. Any good manager would have merely offered up another more amenable lamb to the sacrifice. And any oligarch who demanded 'but I must have that one or the deal is off' is just being a child.

Also, actual Strawberries Romanoff

Egos are an issue, yes, of course. But then so what? Volochkova had/has an ego, the company manager has an ego, the oligarch has both an ego and dramatically-large amounts of money. You mix it all up: Strawberries Romanoff!

The standard recipe for Strawberries Romanoff is refrigerated Grand Marnier-soaked strawberries, a little orange juice, a fine dust of sugar, and vanilla ice-cream. But a better modern recipe that few know about is to have the strawberries soaked in botrytis-effected wine instead of the Grand Marnier. The result is a quantum leap advance in flavour on the original recipe.

Personally, the question I would hypothetically pose in an article to a hypothetical modern era Bolshoi producer or manager is 'if Lindsey Vonn were a dancer, could she make it in your ballet production?'