Pictures Tell Tales To The Wise

I was going to say 'just pics, no words' but alas, I am not that sort of person. If someone said 'talk or we'll torture you,' I might just comment back, 'no, trust me, you don't have to torture me to get me to talk, and secondly, you would be the one being tortured once I start!'

'Please, pleeeeze get him to STOP talking! Aieee!'

There's Saif and Joerg...

Nice white-tie-and-tails there...

Oh and who's that little man in the back smiling? Not sure. (I know, but I ain't sayin').

This was at an opera night somewhere, I think Vienna.

Soon, maybe, if you're very very lucky, I might/may post a pic of the 'Vienna Opera Evening in Moscow' which happened a couple of weeks ago.

Joerg's dead of course. Car accident, uh-huh. Drunk, probably, driving a touch too fast. Some people say it was Mossad. Of course it wasn't MOSSAD. They get blamed for everything underhanded, even those things they had nothing to do with.

There's a Facebook page up I'm pretty sure, somewhere, called 'Who Ate The Quran' or 'The Goat That Ate My Quran.' This is stuck up by the Egyptian Secret Service, and is fronted by a legendary Arabic scholar. He suggests that the goat that ate the Quran that Muhammad was lying on when he died, was a Mossad agent goat, trained to go search for the Quran and eat it, taking advantage of the unmoving, Muhammad. As you know, of course, over seventy per cent of the Quran is in fact missing, since this part of the Quran that the goat ate consisted of the largest section of verses and no copy was made by Muhammad. It's all gone. Now the goat has eaten it.

By the way, the narration concerning the goat eating the Quran is 'Hassan' - 'strong' - and it is certain therefore, according to Islamic scholars themselves, to have happened.

But they never advertise the fact.

So... Mossad killed Joerg Haider, eh. And that must be similar to how they captured Saif and knocked off Muhammar Qaddafi, his dad. 

Did not, though. 

  
You may have noticed that I rarely stick up pics that are not photogenic. Consequently, I will not be posting the advert pics for Range Rover that appeal to the sensibilities of Arabs and Muslims, and draw on the the now-virtually dead Bond franchise to do it.

Let me just say to you however, that all Range Rovers have factory-installed covert tracking and listening technology inside them. And these were not ever installed by MOSSAD! No, they were installed by Saudis.

Enough said.

Nice white-tie-and-tails outfits, though. Nothing wrong with that. There's not enough of it around. 

I wonder if Trump's friend Lola Astanova, will be playing at his inauguration celebrations?

The Same Goes For Money

If you think I seem to be avoiding a lot of the 'hot' discussions or hot topics surrounding today's financial markets - well I am.

At the same time though, I have an underlying purpose to talk about the things I am talking about. Those things tend to be about traditions and 'display of manners' and even recent cultural icon-ism, if there is such a word.

Royal Flush, really, isn't it.

'Modernity' is something that cannot be part of fashion, really. It is ahead of that curve. Modern architecture - well, in fact there is no such thing. Hundertwasser, I suppose, is a kind of genuine modern architect, because he was and still is, ahead of the 'straight line' fundamental presumption of current architectural training.

In somewhat the same way, there are presumptions about money, and about financial markets but the point that Hundertwasser made, and which was perfectly valid too - was that architecture has to be what people are comfortable to live in. It's sort of a Jesus Christ-type comment: 'The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath.'

And so part of my purpose in looking at recent cultural development, rather than what appears to be en vogue cultural habit, is to get some of the younger-minded people who might be reading this (and there are a few of these) to become used to an harmonic code; a harmonic about food, clothes, manners, life - and of course, inevitably, of thinking too.

If you followed my direction, you would end up more than likely not seeing much of 'modern' or 'current' Paris, and only what still remains of the old style, the old Paris. Some people will say, 'oh but that never really was and is just nostalgia.'  But it's actually not.

Now I'll you a funny thing - and go off a recent post in the Wall Street Bearchat Forum: in this, they talked about the opening ceremony of the Swiss Tunnel project, and pointed to the weird, arguably 'Satanic' motifs used and strange, dances and miming. But this stuff is not new, and I will indeed link it to 'Illuminism.' I well recall when Malaysia achieved independence, and the Rotary Club was a major force in public affairs there. They conducted numerous 'State Functions' that included the same kinds of pageantry that we saw this week in Switzerland. Same imagery, same ideas, same, same... Literally it was the same.

This stuff is not new.

Baked Alaska - is not new...

But neither is it really part of the cultural or intellectual elite. It is part of a dislocated and grasping, albeit still very powerful Middle Class ideology that has academic ties.

If you can penetrate the folklore about Griswold Lorillard, and his putative invention of the tuxedo dress code, and see through to the idea of interchangeability of the person inside the tux, you will perhaps also be able to see similarities to the Venetian mask system of society...

And so, when you go to Paris, do stay with the ordinary haute cuisine... It is quite extraordinary.

And after you imbibe the real thing, all the most 'amazing' modern fashions, will seem very ordinary to you. Culture hides things, it is not there to reveal anything to outsiders.

The same goes for money and wealth.

No Muslims Allowed In Maxim's

French style filet mignon is one of the few classic french dishes that is allowed a little wiggle room in its recipe - and still have it be regarded as 'straight-down-the-line' so to speak.

And that, I think is probably because filet steak is easily the most tasteless of beef cuts. Although the meat itself is tender and easy to cook so that it gets that charred-on-the-outside, pink-on-the-inside perfect grilled look, when it goes into your mouth it's like 'what the *!' Nothing. Zip.

Wine reduction sauce, this time with bacon...?

And so, the french do all the sauces thing that they have become justifiably famous for - you get mushroom, red wine reduction, even madeira reduction sauce, parsley butter and champagne, truffles (occasionally) and of course, foie gras. And then, there is a further extension of this 'normal' sauce concept with berries of various, usually red, kinds - cherries or blackberries, typically.

When you want to go for a really top of the line modern red wine, you can do no better than the Chateau Angelus, which is a Bordeaux. Here, in the pic below we have our good friend Daniel Craig and the estimable Eva Green in the excellent train scene from Casino Royale. Unusually for recent Bond movies, this scene stands out as pretty decent for both scripting and shot composition, as well as the Bond 'lore,' as it were. There's nothing wrong with updating the wine... He's got a bottle of Angelus there. So someone has the right idea, anyway. He even has the right kind of piqued cotton off-white shirt, although, unfortunately, for whatever reason which simply defies logic and understanding as far as I'm concerned, his tie is just not sitting correctly, with the back of the collar showing above the knot top. Bad form, really. You can't see it in the shot angle of the below pic, but trust me, it's in the film in the front-on close-ups. Just jarring...

So what's the point and who cares what one eats for dinner? Well no one cares and there is no point if you're at home in your bath-robe, but when you are out wearing your piqued fabric marcella shirt, there is a point and I'm not telling you what it is...

Well okay but you have to keep it a secret: if you're a Britisher - you know, a citizen of the country of Caesar Brutus Germanicus - then it doesn't at all matter what your ethnicity is, where you came from originally or what the colour of your skin is; but it matters a whole lot that you are perfectly alba candida in your outward appearance and in your manners. And, like the sauces rule for filet mignon, you don't even need to be exactly candida all the time.

Beau Brummell was in Paris a lot, you know, despite being a Brit. So was Oscar Wilde. 

It's called civilization. And civilization includes Martin Luther King and Madras sport coats. But it does not includes people who think you can mudabarra your slave girls. And then fail to tell people that's what the Quran actually says. Ian Fleming or Muhammad...? Well, I know which one the angel Gabriel visited. 

Fake Rich Culture

Do you notice all the modern era Michelin 3-Star restaurants? Have you seen how they try to bring in these food innovations like puree'd this or that, with strange colours dashed and splashed all over large white plates, and a touch of purple flower here and there. 

You can get the very rare exception such as the guy up in Scandinavia who gathers stuff from the Nordic woodlands and infuses his meals with all of these completely exotic woodland ingredients. But overall the stuff that one is asked to pay major money for is simply bizarre.

Looks good in pics but it's a fake place
that has no authentic culturalbackground

And then too, there are those tacky places like the huge aquarium-walled restaurant in Dubai. With the stupid wine list that basically is a complete rundown of every 'well-known' French wine name - and nothing of genuine note there. It's just a pop fantasy idea of epicurean dining.

Everything way too expensive, too mass market-focused, too 'brand name-centric...'

There are reasons - very good reasons - why certain dishes always appear in traditional upper class establishments. You can veer off the rails all you want just because you can market stuff to cultural illiterates who have acquired some kind of 'new money,' but it doesn't mean a thing in the long run. The long run is why there is such as tradition. And there is such a thing. Trust me, even if you don't see a lot of signs of it right here, here - is the place that people do drift around who have real class and real wealth. I know, I get the private emails.

Tradition and class is about family and legacy. It's about sons and daughters and what you are handing on to them from what yourself were given. But that's the trouble with 'new money,' it's got nothing much good to say of its ancestry. I can hardly tell you, myself how much I owe my ancestors - those who came before me, and not necessarily just those from my direct family but from the generations before me, and yes, oh dear, the infamous 'class system' of the old days. I have myself never ever heard a genuine aristocrat badmouth the so-called peasant classes - for god's sakes without them, the estates would rundown and die! And nor the so-called 'lower classes' either. But what happened - why is this not the prevailing conception of what aristocracy does or thinks like? Well, two World Wars happened is what happened, and all the decent aristocrats died out! Or most of the anyway.

Remember the montage or collage idea spoken about in the
last article? Genuine modern art does have authenticity...

Now you might not think there is any advantage in knowing about traditions but if I simply lay a few of them out, after awhile, a sort of gravitas will develop in your mind and in your spirit, and you will find the golden road to paradise after all...

All haute cuisine dinner in Paris starts with onion soup.

And onion soup is only ever done one way. That is, the traditional way.

Yes there are signature dishes at places like the Tour D'Argent and so on, but the straight-and-narrow, if you are out with your mistress, will be turbot for a main course. It had better be your mistress too, even if it is your wife... Such things make sense in Paris, if not anywhere else.

This is baked turbot, see... If you look up pics of haute cuisine turbot
on the internet, you will see everything but this!

And a great wine will be something genuinely good, and not just something with a name. And we will look at some of these next time.

I Take You To Art - The Highbrow...

Want to do some art...?

I'll take you there. You have to dress up for it. It's a big show. For luminaries only. 

There's food and drink for women:

Cranberry cocktail - you'll still
get very drunk on it 

Why 'art?' What is 'art' and why do we have it?

Well I'll tell you what it is and why we have it...

You don't know what these are - these are
'top hats.'

"We must get beyond passions, like a great work of art. In such miraculous harmony, we should learn to love each other so much to live outside of time... ...detached." Federico Fellini.

Now I want you to listen to this piece of 'art music,' and to realize that it is a modern art montage, isn't it? The words are all there, but they have been cut and spliced in - or, not so much cut exactly, but drifted in and out through volume control and by the deliberate vocal delivery of the singer herself.

So listen, and then you can read the actual lyrics below...

This is the fastest way I know Alley trees were grown again I cut across the city's backyards And every blade of grass would make me sneeze This is the fastest way I know Alley trees were grown again I cut across the city's backyards And every blade of grass would make me sneeze Oh I swear Surrounded? The sun will set for you The sun will set for you The sun will set for you The sun will set for you (Will set for you) Caught a glimpse of her grace (Will set for you) Caught a glimpse of her grace (Will set for you) Caught a glimpse of her grace (Will set for you) Caught a glimpse of her grace Caught a glimpse of her grace Caught a glimpse of her grace But just now we’re separated – wait up