The Authenticity Of Old Guys...

...and Old Places.

When the Money Supply is genuinely constrained, and so-called 'takeoff velocity' has not happened – or not yet happened – then it is no crime or sin to be without cash.

Whatever you would normally trade in, or have to trade, does not move with as much energy, and cash goes 'into the freezer,' as I like to put it.

But freezers are not such bad things, necessarily. And particularly when it comes to money, you will find that psychology overcomes brute force most especially when the Money Supply and the circulation velocity declines. There's plenty of money out there: it's trapped inside the frozen sentiments of people.

Can you think of ways to warm up the frozen sentiments of people?

What is it with the authenticity of old guys?

I can tell you right now, people severely underestimate the power of subtle and intelligent words and thoughts. Aesthetics is a Greek word meaning 'perceptions through feelings' – people don't need to know what you're doing, they just need to get the right perceptions from the feelings that you are evoking from them.

Thomas De Quincy, the Orientalist writer who was also an opium addict, is a fine example of how words can evoke feelings. And then of course, feelings create perceptions afterwards. I am going to tamper very slightly with the order of some of his sentences for the sake of making sense here, but, all the same, the point is how evocative he writes. Watch this:

“I am surprised to see people overlook winter in his sternest shape, when it comes to the science of happiness. They think it a matter of congratulation that winter is going; or, if coming, is not likely to be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition annually, for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or another, as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fire-side: candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.”

Something is raging outside these days. I would say it's called stupidity, and crassness, and hubris in the confused who yet have pretense to rule.

Close the doors. Put up the shutters. Draw the ample draperies of your mind and light the candles of wisdom. If the calm pool is only in your tea-cup, that is enough – all you need in fact - for you to experience 'calmness.'

You will find, that no matter how separate you have made yourself – even as it were, like a hermit – the world will start to beat a path to the warmth of a composed place. And also to the attraction of composed ideas. You don't have to be confident about what lies outside the doors, only in what lies inside of them. Calmness and wisdom heals... All things.

These Gala Times

The vision and the reality of course, are seldom the same things...

For the greater part of my younger life, I would have quickly said that I wore English gentleman's clothes, only to realise much later when I actually started to look inside at the tailors' names and consciously think about it – that in fact I had been virtually always been wearing Italian tailoring!

Yes, the Bond Street origins of the clothes appeared to indicate English tailoring but the truth was the actual cutters were all Italian. And then I also tended to favour fabrics from Italian and Swiss and even French rather than the generally heavier typical English styles. Eventually, Loro Piana dominated. I still have an old Milanese sports-jacket by Mainardi & Co., which is a very rare tailoring house, but it is still around in various guises and occasionally goes by its own name too under a bespoke format. This jacket is not only far and away the best piece of tailoring I own, it may be handed onto my son – which is an experience I managed to enjoy myself with a good few of my dad's coats and from memory at least one pair of handmade suede shoes. Quite an accomplishment both by my dad – who somehow managed to look after the stuff incredibly well – as well as the makers, whose art in the products simply did not diminish with time.

Even now I'm a hell of a snob and might easily opine that the Italians go over the top with their daring attitudes to the rules of dress.

But then, at the immediate moment, I have been reconsidering all of this peculiar snobbery of mine. I watch the dead boring black suit brigade in all of the world's financial centres, and the world's political elites, with their standard conservative uniform dress code – and I consider how embarrassed they all are for real substance, whether in mind or spirit or actual lawfully-earnt money. And I consider my own wife's Sicillian family, who manage to sweep a few by-laws to one side and put on the most impressive fireworks displays on the city riverside each time one of the daughters gets married... And I think about the brace of Maseratis that park out front of the mansion (it is a mansion, by the way) when the family functions take place, and I especially think about the way the men dress in absolutely – well, to me anyway – outlandishly excessive mens 'fashion.' The silver satin jackets... The coloured batwing bows and cummerbunds... The velvet and gold embroidered slippers...

I've always considered a lot of this carry-on fairly tacky, and it is tacky and even they all think it is too – but, it is also a very special kind of tacky. It is based on a complete self-confidence that they are above and beyond formal dictat from anyone who pretends to cultural and civilized elite-ism. And moreover, that they are above and beyond other people's rules about what to be civilized means. They know the rules before they break them. And that's the significant difference.

I've stuck a couple of pictures in here of some attire by an Italian manufacturer called Ottavio Nuccio. It might look at first sight that they break numerous rules of formal attire and dress codes – but they don't break even a single one. And that is an amazing testament to the style and cultural high-ground that some Europeans possess. I'm not going into details about what is so subtly correct about this picture, suffice to say that it is ideally correct. One of the bits of 'clever' trivia going the rounds among the Western literati and cognoscenti of men's formal attire is the meaning of the phrase red sea rig, or schooner rig (which is the same thing), but this picture goes into even more rarified atmosphere about exquisite formal attire for a gala.

Breaking rules of formal attire? No.

Now you or I may not have the absolute budget to go to all of this excess, but to be careful about dress, even in some small symbolic way, is a reflection of your mind. The point about civilized people enjoying themselves is that they don't need the rest of the whole world to know or approve of what they are doing. It suffices that they know what they are doing and why. The great Italian writer Petrach lived through some of the most terrible and terrifying of times, but he still managed. Old knowledge, manages in the worst of times. Petrarch is generally credited with having first used the term Dark Ages. His insights into what wealth is, and where it is, prove remarkable reading... And as we are currently also in a form of a Dark Age, Petrarch is a useful guide to living in it.

Petrarch's vision, and reality, are closer than commonly understood by the masses and their masters in Fox and in Washington, in Singapore and Beijing and every other place run by tyrants and knaves.

Cuissage Is Not A Myth!

If you just follow the American media's propaganda about public morality and religiosity and ethics, you will certainly resist the phrase I am about to use: 'sophisticated moral intelligence.'

According to the Christian Right and the pharisee tradition of the modern American-style media, morality has to be plain dumb, and anything different to that is likely to be the 'work of the devil.' Thus to add the word 'sophisticated' to 'morality' is almost to qualify it with something evil.

Cuissage...

Yet I have often wondered why it is that everything that is said to be to do with this very popular fellow (i.e. 'the devil') has this touch of the inherently exciting, even whilst it is also most assuredly bad and dark and horrid. And everything, by comparison, that is numinous, is rather dull and boring.

We watch movies like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and become glued by the sections of utter vicious violence; well, at least I did when I watched it!

Admittedly this particular movie is not completely gratuitous in its inclusion of extreme violence as a theme.

However I must warn that I am intending to proceed from the immediate prior post about 'values,' and move the subject along to the idea of the application of values in the hands of wealthy adults. Now I say 'wealthy' adults very deliberately because I wanted to suggest that unless one is not careful, it is all too easy to become dissolute when a lot of time and money falls into one's hands. And this is largely because of a habit that tends to be formed when one is not necessarily so very very facilely um, loaded. The discipline that enforces itself onto spending habits and lifestyle habits due to modest means, is in many ways, a good thing; but it is a 'false' discipline...

One finds so many instances in which commentary regarding some fashionable place, or tourist destination, or upscale (we say 'up-market' among the British over here...) restaurant – splashes criticism around lavishly. The food was overpriced/the service was pushy/you were tried to be 'sold' on stuff/you were not respected/something or other was 'over-rated...'

The very beautiful -
Plaza Athenee entrance

And so let me say something now about going out to a Michelin Three Star table in the context of having anything at all to do with the receipt of service. Servants, are not things you have; they are participants in your lifestyle and they are part of a set of relationships. And your part, as the receiver of service, is that you are performing a role. Literally.

I see people who speak of these things saying that the droit de cuissage (the right over the thigh), is but a myth that some French aristocrats propagated. But it is not. Nevertheless, it entails, as I say, a high and a sophisticated moral intelligence. On the surface of it, a lord of some estate or other, is supposed at some point in the distant past, to have possessed the right to have sex with any of his serf's virgin daughters. Or some such thing along those lines. I know my father often spoke of our family's tendency to have infused itself with 'good peasant stock' from time to time.

But you must understand the impoverished humour of the aristocrats of my ken.

You see these things are not true in the way the words are employed to talk about them. But they are true in very much more sophisticated ways than the common popular media will be able to understand or explain to you.

Here's what I mean: perhaps you go to the Plaza Athenee in Paris, and have read a review in which they go on at length about how over-priced, and how over-serviced, and how unmemorable, the food was...

Ah but you see, for me to go there at all is a performance – by me. At least as much as I expect it to be a performance by the staff there.

And, they will comprehend, if not others, the allusion to cuissage that I make, if I subject my companion to having to wear the thing you see in the picture here. It's a Dior outfit, on the actress Jennifer Lawrence, and I understand all, or most, of the media and entertainment critics carried on at length about her wardroom malfunction, sufficient to make Dior put out a statement.

Jennifer Lawrence,
Also 'Cuissage' but by Dior

But it is not a malfunction.

If you go to, let's say, some Michelin Three Star establishment that you have heard be less than celestial in its service and substance, and offer this Dior'd get-up on your arm, as you alight from your taxi or Rolls Royce, to the doorman, and thence on to the Maitre d' and so on, I am reasonably sure that the placement of her dinner cloth onto her lap, either by the staff or without stares from them when she does it, will break all the rules about dining.

And I am reasonably sure, that you will have a very pleasant evening, and completely forget all about criticisms of the service that you were not 'getting' for your money, because as I have said before, money is not the be all and end all of it. As Karl Lagerfeld says, 'yes it is true; if you are cheap, nothing helps.' But if you are sophisticated, you do not need to be violent, or obviously armed with money, to get your way.

And getting your way, may I remind you, leads us right to the money afterall. The art of getting your way, qualifies the meaning of moral intelligence in ways that only the sophisticated may know about. And I don't think, the devil, is as sophisticated, as an English gentleman – not that I have come across an English gentleman, for many a good long year, and the only real person that I can think of in living existence right now who can fit into the mold, is Hugo Jacomet, and he is French. As far as I know.

For The Younger People

THE POWER OF THINKING FOR ONESELF.

I had never intended this column/blog to be exclusively for people around my age – in fact, this is the kind of place I would have actively sought out, to glean some ideas myself from, when I was a lot younger.

I think I might have said before that I grew up around uncles who were both extremely wealthy, and in some respects, historically significant people. 'Kelvin' McClory was my father's first cousin, and, although he was the noisiest representative of the Thunderball movie 'steam train,' he was not the most important one in our family who was involved with that particular escapade. One of my father's stepbrothers (therefore an uncle to me) was MD of Shell Far East at the time and Shell played a huge role in the financing of the movie.

A 'shut up and take my money'
brief case

But overall, the point I really want to get at here is that there is a major advantage in being able to be around these kinds of people when you are young – I mean, not only are they exciting to be around, but they possess all sorts of amazing knowledge and practical experience that is difficult or next-to-impossible for the normal kid to learn about from the usual sources available to the average kid growing up in modern-day suburbia.

Aboveall the most important thing you can learn from these people is 'values.' And for those entering the world of entrepreneurship, or having anything at all to do with big money, 'values' is by far the most important thing to know about, rather than 'value...'

Oh yes, I mean it.

Sure its nice to have nice things but its far better to have real values. In fact it's better to have values than to have either money or a lot of things. There are a lot of people with more 'things' than either you or I or a hundred 'you's and I's' will collectively ever have in our lives – and those things are yet meaningless, useless, and worthless in their hands; even though they will have cost several fortunes to have acquired.

'Values,' are the most complicated, subtle, and sophisticated of things that it is possible for any human to attain to and possess. By 'values' I don't just mean any old religious or ideological or cultural ethic, nor do I mean morality. I mean something you will never hear in the mouths of preachers today, and certainly not in the mouths of selfish people either.

Values are what defines you the person, you the personal identity; they are you – now, tomorrow, and forever more beyond what you regard as your own personal 'lifetime.'

I put it to you that you have no idea what 'your lifetime' is or will be. Tomorrow, you may wake up to find someone can really put your consciousness inside a supercomputer and you will live eternities as a humanoid machine. You don't know that it can't or won't happen.

Values are why you are exciting to live around...

Values are absolutely not, doing 'right' and knowing right from wrong – values are what make you human, and what makes the human the form of the prime intelligent being in the universe.

And here's my proof.

In ancient times, according to ancient legend, the Great God Zeus, cleverly sidestepped the tricky task of deciding which of three goddesses was the most beautiful. Another heavenly being, 'Dischord,' had rolled a single golden apple into a wedding feast at which the gods were in attendance (according to the legend). Upon this golden apple were inscribed the words 'to the fairest.'

Each one of three goddesses sought to pick the apple up and disputed over which should be entitled to have it – Hera, Zeus's own wife, Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, and Athene, Zeus's daughter.

Zeus then demured from the task, and bestowed it upon the Trojan Prince Paris.

What Hera, Queen of Heaven
looks like

Zeus instructed the progenitor of the Ithican Island part of my own family – Hermes – (see, I have some entitlement to speak about these things authoritatively!) to take Paris to some secluded grove far away, in which the Goddesses would each present themselves to Paris completely naked, and following which he would make the decision as to which was the most beautiful.

Now the rest of this unlikely story is that each of the Goddesses attempted to bribe Paris – and that could not be true – and moreover even Athene, according to this untrue tale, disrobed fully in front of him.

Paris gave the apple to Aphrodite, and in her fury, Athene caused another of my ancestors, Odysseus, to encourage the Greeks to go to a great and mythically heroic war, which they did do, and which today is known as the Trojan War.

What Aphrodite, Goddess of
Love, looks like

Now personally, I have to tell you, from my knowledge of what the Ithicans say of the Greek Gods, that none of this story can have been true even in the smallest element of it. The Gods do not bribe, they do not dispute among themselves, and Athene DOES NOT, on any account whatsoever, go naked in front of a human.

But the story is a story and there is a point to its existence and this point clears up why it is important to realise that there are eternal beings who govern all of our lives even those of the amoral and the atheistic because... ...THE POINT OF THE STORY IS THAT IT APPLIES TO YOU, NOW, TODAY, AND WILL IT SO ALSO APPLY, TO EVERY PERSON WHO LIVES IN THE FUTURE.

Let us assume, for instance, that you are an atheist. Well, here is your challenge, as my ancestor once did, I now also bring before you, the three Great Goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite, and Athene, and request of you, that you decide, which one is to get the golden apple, upon which is inscribed, 'to the fairest.'

You see, the story is not for 'Paris' to have resolved. It is for you, the living human being.

That is to say, as a human being, you are daily confronted with choices and decisions that are within the realm of what the mortal is concerned with – complicated decisions often absent of adequate information, and yet, one may be forced to choose something from which choice may proceed consequences both or either good or not good.

The human will live and it will die, but the decision and its components never will go away; and hence they are immortal choices even though dynamic, and immortal components. 'Values' are the result of both how you go about making your own choice/s over these types of challenges, and how 'human' your perspective is.

What Athene, Goddess of Victory in War, looks like

This 'story' is known in the classics as 'The Judgement Of Paris.' Would that I could be, personally, an atheist. But alas I cannot, as I am an Ithican, and the Gods themselves live quite nearby, and regularly bring to me conundrums and puzzles of some definite ornateness though for what exact purpose other than their own sport, I am not quite sure.

The Tools To Handle The Wealth

Now see here's the problem with having a lot of wealth and living the life that is expected to go along with it:

When you go to Wimbledon – where I wouldn't personally, because I detest modern tennis – but at least when you go, and it happens to be a cold day, they will give you a little hot rock to hold in your hands...

Qantas First Class Beluga

And when you travel First Class on Qantas – which I would do - they will give you this designer pair of silk-lined pyjamas, when you want to sleep off the Bollinger they serve.

And pretty soon you'll get this feeling that most of the rest of the world is badly disadvantaged and must have a terrible time of life. Which they basically do do (have a terrible time mostly, that is).

But why are you so important; so especially deserving?

Now that's an important question. Clearly, it is the wealth which 'makes' it appear that the carrier of wealth is important and better and more deserving. Without being able to carry the wealth (that is, to have any!) one is deprived of all these trinkets and trappings.

The trouble is though, that if at some stage it becomes the case that you do acquire some wealth, then you could easily find yourself lumped with the problem of feeling for all the rest of humanity who haven't got any, and also sometimes, you may be quite disappointed too with your erstwhile wealthy 'brothers and sisters' who do and yet whose attitudes and abilities stand in stark contrast with any kind of ideal human person! You will find yourself stuck between a hot rock... ...and a soft pair of pyjamas.

As the Chinese Classics say the look on the face of the wealthy is never happiness. It's often more like a kind of distress.

If you reject the pampering people will say you are mean-spirited and miserly and if you embrace it they will say you are uncaring and selfish.

Symbols of male selfishness, surely!

And that is the reason why it is absolutely vital that on no account should you disclose to anyone exactly how much you have or how much you can get or how much you can engineer or how much you have power over or how much you can generate. It is an absolute crime and a sin (not really sure what that word means...!) against all the rest of your fellow human beings to not fully absorb yourself in the enjoyment of what wealth can bring, and to not be fully in the moments of utter wealth and grandeur that you afford yourself – on account of allowing the unconsecrated to the art and science of wealth, in at those times.

Only those who ever have been, or are and can objectively realize their position, or who have the capacity to be, wealthy, can understand what this is all about. The concentration of conscious intelligence has the role in the universe of a relationship with everything that is the best. And it is only in this role that one is truly able to see the best in people and things, and to set about its preservation within a world of decay and ignorance and foolishness.