Prussian Spirit

The Best

Nassau Club Days

Beagle Call

Double Breasted Chalk Stripe

New Order (Generation X)

Coriolanus

In All His Power

“Man is too profoundly trapped in his construction. He sells himself below his value and loses balance. He goes towards catastrophe, great risk and suffering. He forces himself into places without exit, they lead to his downfall, yet strangely it is precisely there, forbidden, condemned, fugitive, that he meets himself in his imperishable, indivisible substance. He lays bare the fictions of time and spirit to know himself in all his power.”

Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang (1951)

Savile Row

Happy St George's Day 2012

Tabula Rasa (Arvo Pärt)

Odey On Stocks

As you know, my role in the hedge fund community these days is tangential at best. But I remain in touch with HF colleagues in London, New York, and San Francisco. And I continue to follow very carefully a handful of HF managers whose thinking I respect and whose results over the years have been more than impressive. Chief among these is Crispin Odey of Odey Asset Management in London. His recent remarks on the stock market (below) contradict the common sentiment of the crowd. Which is why I listen to him. Read for yourself:

'Odey is probably one of the few people in the modern financial world who believes that a "history degree is far more useful than a CFA" and a rarity among fund managers in being as comfortable talking on macro issues and politics as he is about individual stocks. His clients are the end beneficiaries of this intellectual restlessness. His long term track record stacks up against the very best. After a poor 2011 in which his funds were overweight equities too soon, 2012 is so far proving yet another stellar year.
...
Overall, Odey remains bullish on equities and has progressively cut his cash holdings. "But in Europe credit is broken so it is hard to say any trend or rally will be maintained in the long run. The only thing I am absolutely certain of is that cash and bonds will not earn a real return and that equities are cheap. They are cheap because they are unloved and will continue to be volatile, but equities remain the right asset class to hold to protect wealth," he says.'

Scott’s: with Crispin Odey, Founder, Odey Asset Management, EuroWeek, 20 April 2012

Poolside

Tweed Punks

'With hindsight, the Sex Pistols seem the quintessential product of the 1970s, their apparent attempts to defy all the inherited moral traditions echoing, in a strange way, the despondent elegies of the ‘extreme right’. Old General Walker, darling of the Monday Club and other far-right organisations of the time, with his horror of ‘blacks, yellows and slant-eyes’, his wish for a military coup to cure ‘this awful sleeping sickness’ of the country, his horror at homosexuals (‘who use the main sewer of the human body as a playground’) is not so very different from John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, with his ‘Anarchy in the UK’. Both articulated feelings of outrage which decent radio channels and newspapers would not carry. Punk, too, was at times quasi-fascist (‘I think Hitler was very good actually’--Siouxsie Sioux) but also fundamentally wistful about what had been destroyed and lost. Sandbrook [author of Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979] shrewdly quotes a view that there was a puritan streak in Malcolm Maclaren and Vivienne Westwood’s demonisation of SEX (the name they gave their shop). Johnny Rotten’s cry to his audience: ‘I bet you don’t hate us as much as WE hate YOU’ is exactly mirrored by the arch-reactionary Philip Larkin’s attitude to his readers. Even Mrs Thatcher, though not a Nazi sympathiser, had something of the Siouxsie Sioux about her, and her perception of herself as someone who said the unsayable and did the undoable was surely the reason for her success, first in her own party and then with the electorate.'

A.N. Wilson, 'Rotten, vicious times', The Spectator, 14 April 2012

City Gent

Oxford Types: The Bullingdons

'On the one hand were the hearties, grey flannel-trousered or elaborately plus-foured, draped in extravagantly long striped scarves indicative of athletic prowess; on the other the aesthetes, in high-necked pullovers or shantung ties in pastel shades from Messrs Halls in the High, whose hair in those days passed for long and some of whom cultivated sideburns. Apart and consciously aloof were the Bullingdons and their hangers-on, always in well-cut tweeds and old-Etonian ties, or jodhpurs, yellow polo-sweaters and hacking jackets slit to the shoulderblades.'

Osbert Lancaster, With an Eye to the Future (1973)

Bryan Ferry Dandy Chic

2e Régiment étranger de parachutistes à Djibouti (Légion étrangère)

Jukes

"The dry sand had turned the corpse entrusted to its keeping into a yellow-brown mummy. I told Gunga Dass to stand off while I examined it. The body--clad in an olive-green hunting-suit much stained and worn, with leather pads on the shoulders--was that of a man between thirty and forty, above middle height, with light, sandy hair, long mustache, and a rough unkempt beard. The left canine of the upper jaw was missing, and a portion of the lobe of the right ear was gone. On the second finger of the left hand was a ring-a shield-shaped bloodstone set in gold, with a monogram that might have been either "B.K." or "B.L." On the third finger of the right hand was a silver ring in the shape of a coiled cobra, much worn and tarnished. Gunga Dass deposited a handful of trifles he had picked out of the burrow at my feet, and, covering the face of the body with my handkerchief, I turned to examine these. I give the full list in the hope that it may lead to the identification of the unfortunate man:

1. Bowl of a briarwood pipe, serrated at the edge; much worn and blackened; bound with string at the crew.

2. Two patent-lever keys; wards of both broken.

3. Tortoise-shell-handled penknife, silver or nickel. name-plate, marked with monogram "B.K."

4. Envelope, postmark Undecipherable, bearing a Victorian stamp, addressed to "Miss Mon--" (rest illegible) --"ham"--"nt."

5. Imitation crocodile-skin notebook with pencil. First forty-five pages blank; four and a half illegible; fifteen others filled with private memoranda relating chiefly to three persons-a Mrs.L. Singleton, abbreviated several times to "Lot Single," "Mrs. S. May," and "Garmison," referred to in places as "Jerry" or "Jack."

6. Handle of small-sized hunting-knife. Blade snapped short. Buck's horn, diamond cut, with swivel and ring on the butt; fragment of cotton cord attached."

Rudyard Kipling, The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes (1885)

Tor House

Carmel, California

Blue Water Hunter

L'amitié (Françoise Hardy)

Locals Only !

Pucci Galore

Why I Am Not A Conservative

The removal of the English writer John Derbyshire from the neo-conservative journal National Review has marked a breaking point. Derbyshire's crime was penning an article at Takimag (listed in links below) revealing certain truths about African behaviour in civilised societies. And for that he had to go. It was inevitable.

I'm done with NR and mainstream conservatism, and have been for a long while. There was a time I picked up a copy of the magazine every week whilst passing through Grand Central Terminal, but I have not read it in over fifteen years. I haven't visited the website since the early 2000s. Every issue of NR seemed like just another installment in the long surrender to the Left. But capitulation is the story of postwar conservatism, both in the US and Britain.

As you know, I have a bit of history with NR, more than twenty years ago in New York City. Even then the NR staff came across as a bunch of faux-snobs and social-climbing pantywaists. I remember one of them in particular, a young Georgetown University grad who wore a fedora and pouty-lipped sneer; his face consistently warranted a punch, which to my regret I didn't deliver. The 'Vile Bodies' parties in Manhattan in the late 1980s, where the chubby David Brooks was known to put in an appearance, were notable for their stuffiness and Waugh-games, beTweeded costume clowns playing dress-up and puffing on Chesterton pipes. The old Jesuit priests of my acquaintance--long-solicited by the nascent neocon crowd in NYC--privately despised them. Later on I got to know some of the new crew that William F. Buckley, Jr. brought into the fold, including certain highly irritating hyper-Catholic writers. As for WFB, I often saw him at Mass at St. Catherine's in Riverside, CT, an old, sloppy, greasy-haired son of a bitch.

Conservatives are not only not up to the task of defending the West, they are directly complicit in its subversion. They are traitors and should be treated as such. They are far more interested in getting an invite to the right parties or getting into the right graduate school. And this is exactly why “conservatism” is losing, and will continue to lose, even as it claims to be winning by suppressing the likes of John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, Patrick Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, and Sam Francis. Francis wrote a book excoriating the GOP (which he called the 'stupid party') and the mainstream conservative movement titled Beautiful Losers. Losers, indeed. Conservatives are betas in bow ties, manginas in madras, pussies in blazers and side-partings. Conservatives are a fucking joke.

I am not a conservative because there is nothing left to conserve. Conservatism is slave ideology for yesterday's men. Conservatives lack the strength, guts, bloodlust, and killer instinct that make winners. I advocate radical, revolutionary change that would make your head spin. I long for force and violence, which, as you well know, is the only way to uphold civilisation. Defending it is a perpetual struggle best left to those who are willing to kill for it. May I let you in on a secret? I dream of war, show trials, separation, liberation, and traitors' corpses hanging from live oaks. But I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself here.

If Nationalists are to prevail, we first must take on the conservatives. And then the white liberals. Especially the white liberals. Their time will come. My (unsolicited) advice to young Nationalists is to finish university, get a job or found a company, start a family, buy property, infiltrate the power centres. Begin the long march. And above all, network as if your life depended on it. Which, in a way, it does. If you notice a tall, handsome, stylish chap lifting weights at the club or practising marksmanship at the local range, in a suit of Tweed, that would be me. I would be pleased to help ease you and yours into the new paradigm. But understand one thing. Ultimately the question is: Are you willing to do whatever it takes to win? That is the only question that matters. Search your heart for the answer. And cultivate your killer instinct. At some point the gloves must come off and we face our adversaries.

We're all Rhodesians now.

Tear Life To Pieces (Robinson Jeffers)

Coop

Fantastic Lives

These days my todger is putting in more overtime than a US State Department official during a Middle East crisis. I'm exhausted. Not that I'm complaining.

As you know, my periodic reveries here are an exercise in forgetting, dreaming, meditation. This is wine and codeine therapy. My life improves; I don't fear death. I think it is because I have separated myself (intellectually, emotionally, spiritually) from the filth that surrounds me, and created my own 'private world' or sphere of thought and activity distinct from the mainstream.

The trick to all of this, I think, is to avoid despair and nihilism. I follow EJ's example of 'inner emigration' as best I can, but this does not entail a hermit's life or a prude's existence. We must accept the conditions into which we are born and move forward. That is fate. Life is to be enjoyed, even in these dark times. It is an unfolding of mystery and beauty. Our attitude should be one of affirmation, a 'yes-saying' to fate. And soon, I think, after all is done, the sun will rise again.

The tests came back negative, certifying me plague-free, thank the gods. The symptoms instead were attributed to the combined effects of traumatic sex and excessive alcohol ingestion. Surprise, surprise. Will I ever learn? Let the whoring recommence.

Love Is Like Oxygen (Sweet)

American Beauty (Assouline)

Rugby Beards

Beard you like? I do. The word sur la rue is that I've grown a beard. It's true, I have done. It's a trimmed model with a reddish-blonde exterior, not unlike that of the chap in the middle of the photo (at left). I've received many positive comments on it, especially from the ladies. What they're thinking, I've no idea. (If you're a chapette and approve of beards, please submit an explanatory comment). Me, I simply wanted to change it up a bit, to effect the Wall Street-meets-Mountain Man look, or, as my chums keep pointing out, the 'Most Interesting Man In The World'. The look, I've been told, suits me quite well.

U-Boot Offizier im Focus

Korova

Oxford Anatomy