Crazy Italians Yes, Staid Germans No

You're not going to find too many people across the internet talk like this - at least not until there is some space between the launch and the hype and the reality:

Stefan Sielaff, who is probably on well north of a million bucks per year as Managing Design Director at Bentley, has presided over the biggest heap of s* that I have ever witnessed foisted onto the dumbed-down public, even if, in this instance, they are supposedly the dumb EXTREMELY WEALTHY public.

You can see the typical Germanic stubbornness, the sheer damn bloody-mindedness of it all - of their intent to force the 'Hunaudieres' concept car 'design' they shoved at everyone at the car shows around the world since f* forever, as far as I can recall. 'Hunaudieres' - albeit it is a nickname for a straight at a major French race track (Le Mans) where Bentley reigned supreme in the 1920's - is clearly meant by the Germans as a pun; it literally means 'hear the Huns coming.'

Here's some good design for you - and I'm
talking about the fabric of the shoes, and the photography...

If you watch their promotional videos, you will encounter very clever propaganda and media-savvy verbiage intended to mislead the average idiot viewer into thinking that they are building a Bentley; they are not building a Bentley, they are building a Mercedes or a Maybach - a slug-looking thing, filled with Dieter Rams' mentality of functionality (what the modern Germans speak of with glowing expressions as 'zer moolti-funktion azpekt.') everywhere. Too much of 'everywhere' in fact.

Now there's nothing particularly wrong with ABS plastic under grilles, and 'diamond knurling' fake chrome and bits of carbon fiber 'und teknologie,' and 'finest kvality handkraffted lezzarh' and other meaningless throw-ins taken from Swiss watch-makers and so on - if you are not buying a British automobile. 

But every time you hear the word 'homage' what they mean is 'it's dead and it ain't coming back and we're doing whatever we want now and f* U!'

If there was still a German Mark in existence as a currency I'd say they'd get close to, but won't actually, kill off the Bentley marque, but they'll kill it off now stone dead'r than a lead doorstop here with just this one single model because they are all backed by rubbish these days pretentiously called 'the euro.'

Don't kid yourselves that these idiots know what they are doing. They have had a ton of money and capital and a good forty years to burn it all and that's what they've done.

This is pretty close to the end. And there's going to be one hell of a self-inflicted old, stale, cake-fight once they go to the cupboard one too many times and find it's empty this time.

Super Self-Assured People - Because?

Many many many many many... years ago now... I went through a matriculation program and then to a University with a young guy whose name I won't say here. But he was quite a remarkable wit - flashy, smart, very funny. His younger brother was ever so slightly more serious though not by any means a dour or dull person.

Anyway - I did know they were from some Italian family with an industrial background but the two brothers never made all that much of it.

Possibly a Neapolitan style, could be Roman...
But it's definitely Italian anyway.

I even knew - since they told me - that they had both been enrolled towards their final years at University, in a specialist industrial college in Italy, called Fabrica. I then totally lost touch with both of them although very rarely I had occasion to speak with one of their grandfathers who made local (Australian) fortified wines over here until his passing a while ago. And, I still run into some of their family over this side of the world, and they mention that one of the brothers in particular, nick-named 'Rocky' would ask about some of their 'olden days' friends and I even came up in dispatches, as they say, around the time I had this tiny little listed Public Company here.

Once again, without mentioning their names, turns out they are part of the executive management of one of the top say, three, four, or five Italian absolute best bespoke and luxury menswear companies. That limits things down to a small few very well-known names but I will specify it is not Zegna or Versace. They are a Naples-based corporation.

Of all the people I knew back when, these guys were the lightest, breeziest, funniest and most well-adjusted, self-assured people I encountered ever.

In hindsight, frankly, it is an identifiable personality trait, both of a certain type of Italian, but also of those people who come from a long legacy of achievement.

Very beautiful - don't you just love the roped shoulders?

There was only one other person I have ever met and knew closely enough to see what they were like in their occupations, who had this same kind of over-arching self-assuredness - apart from the banking genius I worked for for decades - and this other individual was a German who had trained, literally, under Nazis in design and craft workshops as a very young person.

All of them, quite amazing people. If there was one thing I'd really love to introduce everyone here to, (it's a fantasy and will never happen) it would be to some sort of (at this stage) hypothetical private club or lounge at which there were these kinds of people swanning around just doing nothing so that you could tackle them one-to-one and just plain listen to whatever they had to say. In life there is gold, and there are golden words and the two are hard to distinguish as to which is more valuable.

Defining Luxury Properly

Some prominent branding specialists, as well as major news media and up-scale magazines, are constantly talking these days about what the 'Millenial consumer' is doing to the definition of luxury.

An opening statement in this declaration seems to be that 'the days of luxury being synonymous with wealth are over.'

Really? Really, Fortune Magazine? Do you believe this? No wonder all you guys are going to the wall or having your wings clipped 'bigly.'

'Luxury' is the unique place in the barren desert...

Today's branding specialists and marketing people all the same focus around some fairly standard and tradition concepts about what 'luxury' has meant down the centuries. The word itself is much older than most authorities generally say - the Romans had a word 'luxus' which meant excess and self-indulgence. Most present-day authorities like to mention that there was a Middle English word taken from Old French and which meant 'lust' or 'lechery,' the strong implication there being that it has its actual roots in a Western European pagan deity - 'Lugh.'

Modern marketeers make the mistake of adding the idea that today's idea of 'luxury' includes 'authentic craftsmanship.' Well the problem with this is that you can be an authentic craftsman of the synthesizing chemical laboratory but never will you duplicate the actual scent of an actual taif rose.

This is a real place, this is the Liwa Oasis in Abu Dhabi

No. Luxury is a personal thing - it identifies and defines the person as they truly are. It denotes a kind of self-indulgence but on a stratospheric level, not an Earth-bound, limited, needs-based level. And it certainly is about wealth.

The most intensely bespoke thing there is, is the personal individual ego and central consciousness of the particular individual human being. People are very complicated - they have broadly shared qualities and characteristic 'human' similarities, yet they are each completely unique. And uniqueness separates people, it doesn't bring them together. That is, it doesn't bring very large numbers together, but it creates categories and specializations that exist in hierarchies which ascend to the peaks where 'the best' of each category exists, either as a tiny capstone group-let, or even as a single person who defines the actual sole epitome; the perfect example.

This is luxury - all natural, the 'Liwa' from the Velvet Collection by Ali Al Jaberi
of Widian Corporation

'Luxury' means the best... But the best thing for you the individual, not 'the best thing' that might be shared with a whole lot of other people.

Huge Changes

Debenhams announced a huge loss for the year to September, 2018 - virtually a billion dollars ('loss').

Now this is pertinent to what we have been pointing to for the last two years at least: that there has been a major and noticeable decline in the marketplace for all the 'high end' consumer products, and luxury products and luxury brands. This public company's disclosure of such a huge loss really is one verification of what we had been suggesting from anecdotal evidence.

On the one hand it appears as if write-downs of goodwill and IT and 'stores' (what does that mean? Does it mean capital value, as in property value? I don't know...) dominate the 'loss' figure and other than these write-downs there is a trading profit.

This was called, at the time 'the revenge dress.'
Is it blue, or is it black, by the way?

But wait a minute - we are talking a 1% (wh-a-a-t?!) profitability on a turnover of 3 billion pounds! That already sounds like a fudged figure, or at least 'sharp' accounting to get things 'over the line' and 'into the black.'

You would think that with such low interest rates in the Western World big corporates could 'engineer' something better than this kind of unmitigated disaster.

So what's going on? Is it 'the on-line world' doing it?

No, I don't believe that. It is the relentless and utterly mindless drawing off of the domestic circulation of cash money (velocity/circulation) caused by the errant ideology of 'austerity.'

And we are going to hit a lot of brick walls and they are going to take politicians, governments, and whole societies into the grave.

A drop of dew on a rose petal can kill you, and at least that is a romantic way to go, compared to a lot of others that get the press's attention these days... This is the way the gods act, you know - 'whom they wish to destroy they first make mad.'

This Givenchy thing, well, there were two of them,
and two of them are in the museums today...
But I think there were three of them, and one was not black satin, but midnight blue sheared velvet

There is something out there moving around beneath the surface and its hidden hand is manipulating things.

A single drop of dew...

Just remember I said that.

Diana, Dodi, Khashoggi

Well, I'm not entirely sure whether any of you need to be reminded that Jamal Khashoggi was a cousin of Dodi Fayed. The sister of Adnan Khashoggi, Samira - was married to Mohammed Al Fayed and was Dodi's mother.

Adnan Khashoggi was infamous - among other things - for telling a journalist that 'war is marketing...'

Mohammed Al Fayed is not aligned to either of the Muslim World League (Saudi Royal Family backed, officially), or the Muslim Brotherhood, which is partly backed by the Royal Family of Qatar among numerous others.

Qatari gold-covered cars, outside of Harrods

The Qataris bought Harrods from Al Fayed when he decided he could no longer stay in London and decided to retire to Switzerland.

Both sides of the fence of 'political Islam' like to patronize the Ritz Hotels, and as we all know, this has had its shadier aspects, with Diana having been murdered shortly after leaving the Paris Ritz, and Prince Al Waleed being holed up in the Riyadh Ritz Carlton 'coming to an agreed understanding' with whoever is pulling the strings in Saudi Arabia now, be it the supposed re-incarnation of Alexander the Great, as Mohammad Al Massari (Muslim Brotherhood) suggests, or up until this week, Saud Al Qahtani, his vizier.

The next thing worth pointing out, is that despite the incredible annual cash flows from oil revenues, Saudi Arabia has no urban sewerage system.... It's a pretty backward place - most of these places that look good in pictures or at night or from a distance, are different when you get there and are 'up close.'

I'll be able to stay away from this disturbing matter shortly, because as we have seen, Erdogan produced no audio recordings of anything (which doesn't mean to say there aren't any) and the White House is making all the kinds of noises that indicate the matter is more or less over.

Glenfiddich's whisky display at Harrods - don't why it's there,
the place is owned by ardent Muslims...

The Saudi ruling elite made quite a mistake not too long ago when, under pressure from the radical religious groups there, they decided to ask the Americans to take their military base out - which the Americans did - and the Qataris stepped in rapidly and have been putting the Saudi's noses out of joint ever since. 

As I have said many many many times before in this Blog - one of the reasons I write it at all, is because it will save your life one day, when others around you assume the place they have drifted into, the people and the faces that surround them appear cultured, civilized and friendly, and you will know, and no one else will accept what you are saying: that you are in the midst of high danger and, just, well, get the hell out!

Jamal Khashoggi was such a well-spoken guy - the Washington Post wants to have it he even was a US permanent resident (he wasn't - and he didn't have a green card either) and a journalist.

You see, yes, journalism sells marketing - but war is marketing.

Nowadays, you step into some places you think are benign, public, even tourist-y places - and you are stepping into a war zone.

Sweden's richest industrialist, the ethnically Ethiopian
Mohammad Al-Amoudi

Sweden's richest man - Mohammad Al-Amoudi - was detained by Crown Prince Salman late last year and he was being 'negotiated' with over something or other. Al-Amoudi is a massive industrialist in Sweden and while Sweden and everyone is making a lot of noise about Julian Assange, they have not been having as much coverage given to them over trying to have Al-Amoudi released. I think he has been released not so long ago, and, like Al Waleed came to an 'agreed understanding' about which he is going to remain very quiet.

In any event, you might find that some of the street problems with migrants in Sweden have suddenly also been resolved overnight, no one knows how.

And anybody that thinks they know what actually happened in Las Vegas, October 1, 2017, is a dunce.

Anybody want me to publish a list of places not to go - or are you all good on that for now... LOL