Just Showing Power, Not Taking Over

One of the fascinating things to me, is how backwards the cultural life of modern human beings has slipped over recent decades.

And it's partly a consequence of self-willed simple-mindedness. And you can't 'lift up' those who themselves actually want to fall down. Even if you're very strong you'll be working against inertial mass going in an opposing direction.

That's not a Russian Sable dyed black, it's probably
a black diamond mink.
...Unless it's a Russian Sable dyed black. ; ))

In these pages I never post what I consider is visually deficient for the mind to look at - even if it could be looked at for information purposes; yet I still never post these things. And the same goes for sound and music. Which means although I will describe something now, I will not link any actual examples; I will, by contrast, post the exact opposites.

I say that 'dumbing-down' is only partly a consequence of people's own deliberate intentions to reside always in mental laziness - because what is also true, is that there has been a consistent systematic regime of audio-visual lies fed to everyone through the mass media. 

We can probably thank Edward Bernays and his interfering with the 'United Fruit Company' in the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the Guatemala government in 1954, for the CIA's avid obsession ever since, with designing the mindset of the public via mass public entertainment for its own political purposes.

By today, everyone has already forgotten about that movie that crashed all box-office records last week, you know, that thing, that, what was it called...? Yeah, that one. About all the angry white men everywhere.

Now that's actually quite a funny concept to me, except that I myself had the personal experience of walking through a city mall not long ago with my company's young(-ish) engineers, and holding my hands across them and whispering: 'hey that's professor Germaine Greer.' Only to be greeted with the ripostes: 'Who's Germaine Greer?'

Only post pretty things around here!

Well, Germaine Greer 'made love' to that 'entitled' angry white man, one time - you know, the talent-less Jimi Hendrix.

Today, if you search on YouTube 'music for sex' you will be fed a long list of tracks all featuring fairly ordinary sax music, over-drawn and rigidly repetitive drum and bass lines - in fact incredibly boring 'Latin-American' musical parodies rather like 'elevator music' but with the same drum patterns over and over and over.

The reason I have been talking about early modern architects is that in context of their day, their work is very hopeful - even though now, because these ideas have been parodied many times and copied beyond the human scale, they are symbols of dystopian imagery.

I don't think even if advanced aliens did land, and were able to overpower human opposition, they would be very interested in 'taking over' completely...

Any hope left? Not if the asteroid hits...

Now I know that we all want to make money, so that we may have the luxury of standing back, and casually making these objective observations of what we see of the world around us today - and so we will, too - but for just these last remaining few moments before it all hits, I know that at least quite a few of you here will be wise enough to pick up on some clues...  

This month, it will be from the Orionid radian - unless it's
and artificial shooting star.

  

It's a sedate track, but has some well-placed off-beats and

down-slipping minor colors.

And this is not so sedate.

What Happens When...

...you walk with me?

Well, today, some people asked me for spare change, a church begun by the one-time Wimbledon Ladies Tennis Champion Margaret Court stopped me in a city square and asked if they could 'pray over me,' and an enormously wealthy Brahmin-looking local Indian doctor in a drop-top Aston Martin waved at me and smiled while stopped at a set of traffic lights.

Poor, hopeful, rich.

All normal. Nothing unusual out there among the human race -, at all.

As you well know - the 2019 Aston Martin Volante convertible

So just glossing briefly over what's happening with our silver-backed Utility Token (a couple of new guys came in from the Middle East again following some more on-line activity there), it's time to dive deep into the more interesting stuff:

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 

...Changed his name, adding the Dutch form of 'van der' to his mother's maiden name 'Rohe.' He didn't use the German 'von' because there were at the time legal restrictions due to the implication of aristocratic ancestry - and I think, there may be still such restrictions. It happens to be that the maiden name of my own grandmother was 'von Warburg' and you will note that although the American banker Paul Warmburg claimed to be originally from a Venetian family he never used the 'von' title - which casts some doubt in my mind as to what he could have really been.

Seagram Building, NYC (Mies van der Rohe)

The Germans still to this day prefer to say 'von Farnburg' - meaning 'from a far place' - for the 'von Warburgs' who took up residences literally in a mountain with a similar sounding name 'Warberg,' the 'berg' part meaning snowy or a high place. And so there has always been duplicity about the names employed, remembering that after the fall of the Serene Republic, those Venetian families who moved into not easily accessible parts of Europe were still having to evade marauding gangs even in high mountain castles.

So why are we talking about Mies van der Rohe?

Because we are talking about the movie '9 1/2 Weeks' and those van der Rohe and also Le Corbusier design artifacts featured in some scenes in there, and also about suits by Pal Zileri.

Huh?

Oh yeah.

'Pal Zileri' - who make incredibly good high quality fabrics and then design them into top notch modern suits mostly for men - is named after the 'Palazzo Zileri' designed by the famed designer of so many Venetian galleries and courtyards and 'palatial' buildings, Andrea Palladio. An Italian Renaissance poet - Trissino - gave Andrea the surname 'Palladio' after the artifact which Diomedes and Odysseus stole from Troy without which the Greeks could never have defeated the Trojans.

Le Corbusier design house Perriand LC4 chair

Oh yes. The 'Palladium' was a small statue depicting Athene and her human friend Pallas and probably Hermes as well, of which all ancient Greek writers used the following exact words: 'on the safe-keeping of which the safety of the city was thought to depend.'

There are a lot of these types of things, in various cultures - there is the Kursk Root Icon (which is supposed to be in New York City, I think, these days...) and there are rocks from space inside the Kaaba in Mecca, and there are similar anthropomorphic 'stones' in the Hindu cult of Tara-Tarini (Sanskrit meaning 'crossed' or 'star-crossed'), to say nothing of the infamous Temple of Artemis meteorite stones at Ephesus.

Poor, hopeful, rich.

You think any of these human beings actually knows what is going on?

The Christian-type people told me Jesus died for my sins. And that is why He died; according to them.

But I tell you, He died because human beings couldn't damn well see what they were looking at.

'Hopeful' Predictive Programming

And that is not to say 'they' are not going to carry out some stupid 'incident.'

People, I think, are gravitating too much around the notion that there is going to be some other 'Aurora shooting'-type event to do with this 'Joker' flick. For whatever purpose these conspiracy theories can come up with.

But to me that is not even the main sinister aspect of this recent, indeed current, media scam. As Lionel Nation recently pointed out, the legal definition of 'lying' is when someone tells untruths in order to deliberately deceive. 'Joker,' the movie, is a scam. 

Something beautiful for you to look at, unlike 'Joker,' which is ugly
and illiterate. This is called the New York Cafe, but it is in Budapest.

Movies, as in the visual telling of some fictional story, are entertainment; and 'fiction' is not lying meant to deceive.

We're all grown up adults, and we are quite capable of handling the sophisticated but quite normal trails of the human mind in its manner of well, simply being and having fun, I suppose.

Well anyway, we'll see what happens. Whether this thing just fades into the usual history of Hollywood movies... ...as many do.

Although, just for academic interest, let's compare this movie alongside something say, from pre- the big, Eighties' stock market Crash.

Have you noticed that in order to be topical and to capture mass audiences of the day, movies quite typically utilize obvious images of obtaining lifestyles that ordinary people are aware of or think really are what is going on in the society around them.

'9 1/2 Weeks' was about a markets arbitrageur, 'Wall Street' with Michael Douglas was about a literal Wall Street entrepreneur and the goings-on with that sort of lifestyle.

The first of those two movies was made well before the actual Crash - it finished being written as a screenplay based on Ingeborg Day's true-to-her-New York-life autobiographical novel written in the early Eighties, and was fully completed as a movie in 1984 but released only in 1986. It made a total loss inside the USA losing more than half the film's production cost - no one inside American apparently liked it at all; audiences gave poor reviews and people stayed away. The 'theory' given as to why, is that censors too heavily edited it for American release.

Ingeborg Day - she wrote '9 1/2 Weeks'

However right from the minute it was released elsewhere around the world it zoomed ahead to a box office smash and something of a cult movie even to this day.

I'm not sure many people have ever really, perhaps outside of a few 'salons' of intellectual people in Munich or god I dunno, Sydney... ...discussed this, but '9 1/2 Weeks' is a highly highly culturally sophisticated work, and far from just being some simple mass appeal 'erotica.' But it isn't something the modern American standard of education is going to be able to cope with.

To this day I don't think that many people realize '9 1/2 Weeks' is the pre-cursor, the true 'ancestor' as it were, to Kubrick's EWS. You see, the signs and symbols and indicators inside the movie are all there, relating to some kind of 'clique' of really quite dark figures of moneyed and political power - but many of those 'signs' will fly right over the heads of most modern-day viewers. In fact, if anything, there is even more of a sinister, quite satanic sexual undercurrent going in the movie, compared to what you see rather obviously in 'Eyes Wide Shut.' 

All these movies - and maybe even including this week's release, 'Joker' - reflect real life events on a grand scale: 'Wall Street' foreshadowed the big collapse on the equities market, and 'Joker' is telling us that the public has gone insane and that everything is about to get even more dystopian than it already is; but in some 'grand' way.

Every single one of the pieces of 'furniture' in this scene is a highly valuable classic of
major industrial design artists and masters. There is Le Corbusier, there is Cassina Perriand LC4,
and a number of others. Day was, of course, in real life an art dealer in New York.

See the secret of this move ('9 1/2 Weeks') is to do with the original author - Ingeborg Day. She was not exactly a 'Lebensborn' as far as anyone has said, but she was from out of a very special 'high cultural education program' run by the Nazis. And she was, most certainly, both an art historian as well as a design and industrial social history expert. I could, in theory' 'teach' some course on this, but no one would pay enough and what would be the point anyway - people would end up trying to 'walk on rice paper without leaving marks,' etc.

You're better off realizing that Ingeborg Day and Virginia Woolf, um, let's just say, have a lot in common. And I select my words quite deliberately. 

'They' - the weirdos in Hollywood now - are hoping their predictive programming is going to be reflected in the public; they are wrong.

Bombay Basera Dubai - Authentic

Okay so Tao just posted a comment about what is authentic in today's world. And this is pretty much, more or less, the theme I was on about.

What is authentic?

And which part of 'wealth' is authentically entitled to be included in there, in that term?

One of our friends and occasional contributors travels to Dubai for business and in Dubai you can encounter all kinds of everything related to 'wealth.'

From the Bombay Basera, Dubai

Certainly if you go or stay at the Taj Hotel in Dubai you will be in the lap of luxury, but it will be a Westernized form of 'fusion' modern culture and luxury. And this is not going to give you what you might be really interested in...

For example, I suppose everyone knows that if you order a korma from any Western-located Indian restaurant it will be 'spun' for the modern Western taste expectation - and consequently it will be full of handfuls of plain white sugar!

So if you are ever in Dubai, try the Bombay Basera Restaurant at the Residence Hotel, rather than the Bombay Brasserie at the Taj. The Basera is an absolutely authentic Indian vegetarian restaurant which also does very good Mediterranean-style vegetarian dishes.

Authentic Indian vegetarian food - and I mean authentic - is truly exceptional and delicate as well as flavorful. And probably it's a form of 'food medicine' with respect to the genuine spices in it. 

Silence Of The Constellations

The Constellations are not silent. The problem is that the brains of most human beings are not sufficiently tuned to the sophistication required to match the high harmonics that reach us from that far away.

Tragically, much of the world today is consumed with 'necessary' tasks, 'urgent' matters, 'vital' and 'important' but in the long run utterly meaningless time-wasting expenditures of human energy which dramatically decrease the numbers of neuron connections being used at any one time, and therefore lessen the complexity of neural networks in the brain.

Now next week, when you have a lot of money at your disposal, you can slow down from what you are doing today, and push back in your soft seat a little, and turn up the capacity of your brain and of your mind...

Perhaps you can think about Jo Lewis, the high end luxury and styling design manager for McLaren - and how she has turned a monster supercar into the only genuine 'GT' rival to the latest Aston Martin Superleggera. There are still a tiny handful of brilliant Brit designers (in different vogues, certainly) left today - Roja Dove, Antony Price... ...and Jo Lewis. (The 'Jo' is a female 'Jo,' right...)

McLaren designer Jo Lewis with pure cashmere

And you can kick back and listen to Rachmaninoff's 18th Variation of a theme by Paganini. 

Or Donovan Townes' 'Autumn's Fall.' Townes goes by the stage name of 'Z8phyR.'

I am not, trying to hypnotize or brainwash you. 

Because none of you have asked and it would be extremely impolite to just go ahead and do it.