Drinking wine, entertaining women, and rescuing old buildings

Okay I don't remember who said that. But it was some important person. Or it should have been.

Old buildings are important in ways that are regularly unobserved by far too many of us. When cities fail to retain some pockets of run down, less than salubrious buildings, the economic spectrum changes inside that city. Old buildings often attract only meagre rental rates – but this has the consequence of maintaining the presence of rare types of start-ups, students, minority special interest endeavours and a flow of humans who in spite of other factors contribute economically to surrounding businesses and to transport and other services. Apart from structural architectural real archival meaning, old buildings preserve a social continuity that without which, cities have only a theoretical and 'experimental' form of social and economic foundation. Old buildings create employment at basic levels in ways that new buildings only create vast gulfs of unemployment on account themselves thereof, and old buildings provide and maintain social and economic bridges between one mature business cycle and a nascent one. Today's worldwide property market problems are expressions of a mindless and over-excited – and ultimately a mistaken – obsession of making money from property 'development.' And property 'development' is quite different to the philosophy of architecture. That is my own view. I always remember the phrase delivered by Woody Harrelson in that movie with Demi Moore, which quotes the architect Louis Kahn: “every brick aspires to be something... ...more.”

Every woman of potential greatness secretly aspires to something... ...more. And that too is my own view coming from the perspective of a man who likes, at least conceptually, to believe that he might rescue old buildings. And also find some space in which to drink wine too. All these things are very difficult to achieve in a fine balance.

One can see the possibility that much is missed out on when society fails to preserve its temples of the mind, and its figures of the recent past, and its social and cultural memory and artefacts.

Alas I no longer have the books belonging to my father written by his favourite writer of the english language – Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. For if I did, I would much more vigorously stuff down the throats of today's long-heads, that (again in my own view) Eton was never, the pinnacle of an english education to those of the genuine aristocracy, but rather, a place to send the second sons of money who could hold no deep thoughts in their head and were better off tying vines and slogging through mud and carrying out orders explicity. Quiller-Couch went to Clifton House. And so did W.O. Bentley.

Who today knows that much about Quiller-Couch? Who knows that much about Gertude Bell...?

Fancy that though, for Gertrude Bell finds an excellent excellent space in the wikepedia. And may I say just this, it would be hard to find a more accurate and more truly inside intelligencer of all things Al Qaeda and politically Arabic than the wikepedia entry for Ms. Bell.

Far be it from me to suggest that Oxonians wrote the Koran. One of my uncle's best friends was a certain Leslie Charles Bower-Yin, of whom it was told in my family that he himself really penned but perhaps two books concerning the adventures of the pulp literary legend The Saint. And far be it from me to suggest that Oxonians also penned the rest of that series! But reading what you can today of Bowyer-Yin, might give you an impression of what goes on in writing and publishing and the marketing thereof.

I do recommend looking at the Wikepedia entry on Gertrude Bell. She was my father's aunt. One of three quite illustrious aunts in fact. Ah for the past!

(Bell is at the extreme left of the hand-tinted old pic)

And yes 'W.O. Bentley' created those British cars. Here's a pic of today's model:

Best, Calvin J. Bear.

WINE, FITNESS, AND FUR

The Singular Problem of the Very Wealthy

I know 'wealthy' people. Or 'said to be wealthy' people. Some have very grand numbers against their stated value. Some have grand numbers stated for them by Forbes or the various national Business Review Magazines that list this kind of thing.

All the ones I know have big ropes manned by sturdy Lascars tying them to responsibilities or duties or ideologies or merely, to strong delusions. There are those I don't know personally, or at least don't know well personally, but who give me indications that they are different – free from the unwanted detritus of big money. I recall one gentleman who attended the evening harness racing events in the middle of cold wet winter with his pyjamas clearly sneaking out from under his trousers and cardigan. He was certainly one of the wealthiest shrimp and lobster shipping tycoons in South East Asia. Not just 'unaffected,' I think perhaps militantly so, really. Eccentricity – of one sort or another - is very common among the rich.

And for the materially normal among us, the firm ties of responsibilities are only too the same – take the kids to school, wash the car, clothes, dishes, go to work, and on and on. They are still demanding of time and energy and care. We cannot do just whatever we want simply whenever we want! But we could do, with a little extra little thing...

I fancy that all one requires (why am I speaking in the voice of Robert Morley here?!) is an evening spa for genuine adults. Not a day spa. Although day spas are great too, of course.

No, I fancy an evening spa.

There is all this needless dressing up and carrying on that goes with so many things. Let's admit it, we live in a digital screen world, many years up the road from just flopping down in front of the analog television. We can let the Hollywood stars and starlets do all that dressing up and primping for us – especially since they have teams of attendants to help.

The customary attire for my evening spa shall be nothing more complicated than an expensive and luxurious bath robe or dressing gown and slippers. If this kind of thing is good enough for Hugh Hefner it ought to do for the rest of us. One ought to be able to be picked up discreetly by a functional, modern, fully-equipped lounge on wheels – something like the latest Honda Odyssey, which the fairly suave George Clooney recently proffers in advertisements. At a whim or a call from an iPhone or iPad, one ought to be able to call round the vehicle replete with a small hamper of pre-arranged pre-prepared finger food, not too distantly recognizable from the standard and quality of high tea fare at the new Claridge's.

One just might run to a personal masseur on board or at minimum an electronic device that mechanically massages one's feet, or back.

And then one might be restfully and unhurriedly conveyed around the evening streets, to some high vantage point to observe the twinkling city lights, and next on to one's 24-hour Jetts fitness facility to consider the option of a deep night workout... Or a spot in the carpark to read the latest fitness publication or the online Saturday Evening Post via the courtesy wi-fi hotspot.

The truly rich, I think, despair of meaningful intelligent company on fair terms. I wonder myself why cannot company speak with the same deliberate, paced, precision, schooled, practised, designed progression of a Trancelife CD...

But the truly adult, and not the merely rich, just might be able to manage a few arrangements a little closer to what is ideal. Money can buy one a splendid form, or even a decadent form, of solitude. But only knowledge of the world and crafted maturity can supply one with a splendidly decadent form of company. The secret lies in two words: beautiful and wise. The Beautiful Wise. Wisdom has a touch of decadence about it, since it always comes after mere experience, and perhaps after experience alone has already begun its fall into decay. And the beautiful, is not really beautiful at all, unless it is also wise.

It was wise several years ago to purchase gold. It is beautifully wise today to have done so. But to paraphrase the great Warren Buffett: it looked wise, and it was wise, but it might have been even wiser still than it looked. There is a long, long way yet to go for the price of gold. A very long way.

The Generations Of Genius

Great intellects turn up regularly but not constantly or continuously – there is usually a gap of many years between a sort of tide of bright people. Pure intellect is not like art or music, which you might even say is taken to a peak through unwitting inspiration. Whereas the exercise of pure intellect is mostly a matter of just plain hard work. How many people, for example, were convinced because of poor teachers, that they weren't good at maths, or literature, or history...? How many successful mathematicians, scientists, historians, writers will tell you, by the same token, that what got them there, was dumb persistence!

My private theory is that it isn't about genetics or generation-skipping, but about the tendency of the power-driven to exploit the work of great intellects, and commandeer the apex, as it were, and hold back competition.

Thus you will get one generation that is able to avoid the scrutiny of the power-mad at the top who are moving into the decline of advancing years, and thereby re-express the work of genuine active intellect.

Right now I am in the middle of reading a book I missed reading earlier while I had consumed just about everything else of his – Asimov's 'Prelude To Foundation,' a rather large book which pre-sees all this current 'global warming/climate change' stuff. Asimov the scientist and thinker is transparently the author's voice behind each of his stories – he's a very clunky writer whose hand, if not exactly heavy, is quite evident. But of course he's still very readable. His intellectual height comes from his grasp of the importance of science, and his ideas – philosophical and even I would say political – rather than merely his slickness with words. The next identity I'd like to say a few words about is Len Deighton.And here we have a great intellect unhampered by the vast difficulties of specialised and often extreme science. Here we have an intellect - whose actual spoken voice is a cockney one – who can speak in ways so cleverly that out of the frisson of his mental games, we are left only that much later having to acknowledge how towering an intellect he really is.

I find Deighton a dangerous personality. He is utterly self-effacing to the interviewing camera but this belies his obvious self-comprehension about what the public can, and cannot, take, from the genius.

Still, Deighton is from the last great intelligent generation. We have not yet seen what the new crop has to show us; what it has to thrill us with and titillate us about and open our eyes to.

Will it come? Is it really going to come? We've been fed such utter drivel by people like Murdoch and Reagan and Thatcher and that crowd for over more than thirty years now.

Oh yes, it is coming. As surely as those old fools are dying. Nothing surer. You can smell genius. It's like getting into a brand new Rolls Royce – it's like opening a box of brand new leather shoes inside a church basement...

All the Best,

Calvin J. Bear

The Elite Cocktail Culture

You think you know everything people do in the world? You think the internet avails you of all this knowledge? ...I smile.

What you know is just the commonplace...

“Diamonds are a girl's best friend.” No they're not. Of course everyone knows the marketing plan De Beers ran from way back, even before Marilyn Monroe's wonderful screen rendition of the song. But what you don't know is that in antiquity, diamond's were legendarily for men.

In the book “The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” this ancient belief is related there, namely, that a diamond, if given to a man, will make him indomitable and guaranteed to succeed in all his endeavours.

And so, if diamonds are really for men – and better so if given to them(!) - what then do or should women wear in rings, that are the best thing for them?

So little does the common person know that I hesitate to break the silence of the elite...

Well, let me just say that, in the 1920's – in the Prohibition Era – it was certainly true that cocktail rings worn by women, were a sign of revolution; and this is not a rare item of knowledge about social customs or codes. Some people argue that the oft-attested 'fan code' of the Victorian Era was not nearly as common or well-organised or understood as is pushed by Romance Novels. However, the opera glove code, or 'wordless language' of signs using gloves, became quite well-known from at least the 1920's through well into the 40's and early 50's – and it was indeed very much from the romantic 'fan code' that its own linguistics sprang.

What I am prepared to tell you right here and now, is that among the most sophisticated in modern Europe – that is to say among the crème de la crème of modern haute salon society – the secret code of cocktail rings allows for assignations to be made between adults, and that not a lot has changed since the time of the Serene Republic and when 'the game of eggs' was played in those days between masked, fascinating strangers and their secret dalliances and potential future lovers.

However it is most important to again distinguish the romance from the actuality: nobody really learns precise 'codes' as some kind of litany requiring that precision and an extensive secretive code vocabulary – developed ideas are often just games going on in the head of the individual on one side. But there is an unbroken set of simple social traditions preserved among sophisticates, usually of 'a certain age' - as they say - which goes back through the social disturbances of economic crises, and the big wars, including the Napoleonic too, really. And it consists of a few simple ideas like this: adults have to have developed adult tastes before they can fully participate in adult games. There are many people who indeed believe they are 'grown up' and have passed the nominally juvenile years; but they are not 'grown up.'

For a man to have developed adult tastes, he must know how to take fresh oysters with his martinis. How to acquire their flavour, to take with salt or not with salt, or add spice or hot pepper sauce. Such things are acquired tastes. Whether among adult men or women, they are acquired tastes and habits. To wear one's cocktail ring on the index finger is good, or on the middle finger – these denote consecutively: positive power and balance. But to wear one's cocktail ring on the little finger implies one must expect to have to, at some point, drink one's martinis standing up.

All The Best To My Faithful Readers,

(Not) Ian Fleming

Monarch Programming - Not!

Alas, but I think we are now in the Age of Lycenko Science... There are too many pressures on too many ordinary ordinary people and the result is that academia is spewing forth people with a moral compass firmly fixed to the Dollar Sign. Using the loaded gun of borrowed knowledge from other eras, they seem to find it easy to apply 'statistical irrelevancy' to cover over unknowns, and with a truly breathtaking arrogance, charge ahead with applications of many dangerous things. The other side of the same coin displays the various popular myths and legends of modern times – and then which are easily packaged away into the 'conspiracy theorist's' bin-for-instant-dismissals.

I like to entertain myself hearing about silly notions that fixated people have about weird conspiracies that are supposed to run our lives – or enslave us, or some of us, at least!

Here's one that I particularly enjoy: Monarch Sex Programming!

This is about the idea that some department in, or scientific group funded by the CIA developed a way to so totally control the minds of selected subjects, that they could have them either 1. assassinate people on command and have no recollection of what they did or why; or 2. be the sex-slaves of people in important positions in order to exert some power or influence over them or get secret information and so on.

And next, the legend/myth goes that somehow, cloning of people had occurred and clones with genetic memory of their programming(!) were in existence being used as per the two items abovementioned.

The code word 'Monarch' was supposed to have come about due to the way Monarch butterflies are supposed to have a genetic memory that allows three consecutive generations of them to traverse a huge migratory route of almost 3,000 miles, each individual travelling through entirely different segments of the journey, but with the third butterfly in the set of three finalling reaching a particular spot in a small forest that its ancestors had, over many iterations of this migratory saga always gone to, to lay eggs.

You will still find to this day, mainstream scientific literature referring to this example of 'genetic memory programming.' Most of that literature which focusses on what mechanisms the butterfly itself uses – as opposed to writers who are focussing more on general gene science, gene coding and gene mechanisms – is now starting to talk of magnetic sensors in the insect. And you will find that even the most authoritative and leading credible stuff is quite confident that it is now these wondrous magnetic sensors that somehow point out the route to the butterfly. And so, we have wandered from an amazing mist in the gene equation, to another amazing fog in the 'sensors' of the butterfly.

Anyhew... The metaphor of the Monarch Butterfly was actually applied, by a brilliant mathematician and strategic thinker and amateur psychologist who knew its Greek scientific name 'Danaeus Plexippus.' And he used what some say is the literal translation of the Greek, 'sleepy transformation,' to describe the process of creating these mind control 'slaves.' There is some factual evidence that the CIA did have a research project of the type that the conspiracy theorists say is still in existence.

Anyone, who really cares about scientific method and rigor and solid empirical results, realizes that there is so much that we don't yet know that the best scientific statement on what the Monarch butterfly is doing and how, is that 'we don't yet know.'

I am deeply inside extremely large and financially well-found - and global – corporate enterprises. And I can tell you that there is some stuff that we know that is not in the published academic arena. Some scientists make discoveries that are earth-shattering and have immediate economic value to corporations, and usually, these people 'disappear' into some fabrica or r & d foundation with a huge amount of money budgeted for them to spend on technical and commercial developments.

You think you use 'lemon' or 'lime' scented liquid detergent? The discovery of the molecules that enable a synthetic lemon or lime scent to not degrade rapidly the way even natural lemon or lime does was worth billions and billions. Virtually every dishwashing product in the entire world uses the discovery of just two people – and that discovery earns billions. You will find very little literature on who these people are or where they are right now. ...Or what they are doing.

Some people in large corporate enterprises know how the Monarch butterfly makes its journey, that is, manages its navigation, over several generations.

'Monarch' is also a word that means single leader. In some conspiracy literature, they also talk of a Luciferian or Satanic Illuminati Cult in reference to the Monarch programming thing. I love all this, don't you? So we have a secret group, that, since at least the 50's, has cloned or virtually cloned, individuals who are brainwashed and programmed as sex slaves for despotic leading figures around the world.

Well either where there is smoke there is fire, or – where there is smoke, just bring along some mirrors and you can have a lot of fun.

Or... ...both are true to varying extents.

I just don't understand why Rupert Murdoch's News Of The World hasn't hacked any of these people's phones and run stories of their amazing sex lives on the front pages! My god, how incompetent. I mean, doesn't he have his own telephone number?! ...What a sight, Rupert Murdoch having sex.

Actually my point is this – you will never see who the people are behind the commercialisation of Viagra. And I mean, that is to say - the executives in the companies that took it on from the scientists. They are wa-a-a-y more powerful than Rupert Murdoch.

I like Lafite, don't you? It's a friendly, feminine wine. If a programmed sex-slave were a wine, Lafite would be it.

I could have stuck a pic of Murdoch and Wendy Deng here but I like this one of Eric de Rothschild better. And besides I like him better as well. Not that I have ever met him.

Best,

Calvin J. Bear