we crashed

 

Chatting with a group of work buddies, I explained that I subconsciously 'mark' TV and movie parties to compare them with the lavish events our own company used to run. 

Oligarch glitz? I can top that. Live music?  - Probably that too. Food - easy. It reminded me again when I watched the first few episodes of WeCrashed, which is about the rise and fall of WeWork - an office environment for millennials.

It's the story of Adam Neumann, his wife Rebekah Paltrow Neumann, and their billion-dollar company that sold work space as a service.  Except they called is Space As A Service (SAAS). It's a fascinating story that goes up and then comes down. 

 

The thing is, I've been with some of these types when I used to work for an American firm. I can remember the day I joined, we all scooted off to a nearby London restaurant and were wined and dined. The company laid on coaches to take us there and back.

At my first company meeting in the USA, we had crazy raffles, based upon the serial numbers of US $5 bills. Big prizes if you were able to win something. And 'look under your chairs' to see if there was a $100 bill hidden.

Every year we'd have one of those big Xmas bashes, which would always be at a venue with funfairs, dodgems, performance acts and good food. 

I can remember being in a restaurant in Greenwich, CT and on our table were several millennials talking about how they'd vested their shares from their last company or two. 

Another occasion, one of them arrived at a (different) restaurant in his boat. We all climbed aboard and he took us for a spin out around Greenwich Point Park and then on four powerful engines up to Norwalk. Over our shoulders we could see the Manhattan skyline.

Then there's the time we were all sent to Maui for a company meeting in a beach resort.  I hired a Mustang and we drove to the top of Haleakalā, the active volcano, where we could watch the sun set. 

We, like in this story of  'We Work', used to run client parties too. We'd hire big. A palazzo in Florence. Gaudi's House in Barcelona for a masked ball, MGM studios in Orlando for a street party. The entire waterfront of Cannes for a multi-hotel party with live music (including a Queen act), played from a stage floating in the sea. As many rides as you could take, with no queues in Disney's Tomorrowland.

Probably even bigger than the scale shown in WeCrashed. Except #TheyCrashed and #WeDidn't.

I guess I like this series more because I can recognise the characters and situations. Although I'm not sure it is a good long-term way to live. But I wouldn't have missed the experience.

Licorice Pizza

A confession that I like the metaphysical mayhem of Inherent Vice so much that I've watched the movie several times, and even as I write this I'm thinking I'll need to watch it again. It's based on a Pynchon novel and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson who recently had another movie at the cinema. 

I missed this latest one - Licorice Pizza - because of timing challenges, but have now finally caught up with it on Apple TV+. 

It is a gentler movie that Inherent Vice with a simple story the 15-year-old boy actor Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman - son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) meeting 25-year-old Alana Kane (played by Alana Haim), a photographer's assistant, and their flirtatious relationship. 

It is an episodic movie, plunging the characters into various set pieces evocative of teenage schemes offset by the 25-year old Alana's perspective on the same things. Their relationship swings around hairpin bends at times. There's a certain friends and family feel too, such as the rest of the Haim band turning up as Alana's siblings, and we get Tom Waits showing up as Rex Blau (of course he is) and Bradley Cooper as a self-centred film producer.

Being set in 1973 also allows a slew of inappropriate behaviours to be depicted. I'll only mention the drink-driving here and Alana's white tee shirt advertising Virginia Slim cigarettes.

And Licorice Pizza? Why, it's black vinyl, of course. And there's a good slice of music of the 70's served up within the movie.

There used to be about 30 of these stores in Southern California.

Temporary stall

I've reached Page 200 in my latest novel and am at that difficult transition from Part 2 into Part 3.

It is always a difficult point and I've also made a few notes about some earlier sections that need re-work. 

I'll mull over it whilst I take a walk or paint a ceiling. That'll be after coffee. I think this will become Novel 23.

broadside

There is a project at the Museum about the sugar trade, based on our local maritime connection. It involves plantations and the slave trade, which did feature in the west of England economy.

I'd also recently read Wake, a graphic novel by Rebecca Hall, an American academic, who skillfully weaves her direct experience of investigation with the narrative of the triangular Atlantic slave trade, comprising sugar, tobacco and cotton to Europe, textiles, manufactured goods and rum to Africa and slaves to America.

It all came together in a short talk by David Olusoga at Budleigh Salterton, when he succinctly presented some of the issues. They are also available in a much longer and more detailed form in his book about Black and British. 

 

Someone in the audience asked him one of those oppositional questions, and I was surprised that he launched into an attack. It was clear that he'd heard this line of questioning before, like those strange agent provocateuers on Twiter.

Rachel Parris live at the Northcott

An excellent evening yesterday, as we resumed old habits and zipped along to the theatre to see Rachel Parris performing her stand-up show. 

The advantages of living in a smaller city were all too apparent to us, taking only ten minutes to get to the Uni where the the gig was booked, easy parking and an uncrowded bar.

Then to the show, which opened with Parris singing a song about those in the audience who had been brought along, only knew her from the Mash Report and so on. It took me a moment to adjust to the fact that she sings, and plays piano rather well. "Classically trained" as she put it, with a virtuoso run along the keys.

The show was densely packed with anecdotes and home truths, which invariably included references to Covid and the government, but stopped short of anything involving the most recent events. 

It was all well-observed and funny, and Parris worked the audience for the extra laughs. 

She described how she had become well-known, not directly from the television Mash Report, but from the repeated posting of funny clips on social media. She described the day when the retweets and watches were pinging her phone every second. 

The Northcott was packed and with a good mix of audience types. Parris described her last gig in Lichfield where she said a couple of people walked out, but there were no such scenes for this show, which still taunted the same rogues.

There was also a section where she dealt with mental heath revealing that she had suffered badly after a year of what should have been pleasant turmoil. 

From not knowing much about her, by the end of the show, I felt that she had revealed a considerable amount, and entertained in the process.

aromatic

I'm enjoying the aroma of my latest novel, "ignoble". 

Instead of being printed on classic white paper, I've gone for a wood pulp finish. 

Most people won't notice the difference, but with ignoble, it is possible to smell the wood on which the ink has been laid. 

For artefact lovers everywhere, it is out of the regular sequence of my novels, and strictly it is a compendium of 'Corrupt' and 'Sleaze', but it does really evoke that 'hug a tree' sensation. 

This is truly a book to bury one's nose in.

ignoble : a corrupt and sleazy compendium

This time, I thought I'd try an experiment with a different format cover. 

 Already, several unsolicited remarks have reached me along the line "it's different!" 

I wanted to try something where the artifact of the novel is printed on woodpulp, has a scuffed faux-leather cover and looks as if it has been partly written in ink. 

 I'm still waiting to see what the final product will look like, and after all it is more an exercise in marketing,  particularly given the £1.99 Kindle eBook price for all 898 pages of the two novels of Corrupt and Sleaze. 

The full book weighs in heavily and I'm afraid the physical copy will reflect that in its price.

The novels are set in modern times, around Parliament, which has its own set of unsavoury pacts. 

Some of the characters from earlier novels are still operating. Anyone familiar with The Triangle, The Square, The Circle, Raven or Raven's Card won't have too much difficulty diving into these.

Maybe it is time to step away from the keyboard?

Sleaze: Beep-beep, Beep-beep, Yeah

 

Well, here we go with Sleaze, the follow up book to Corrupt. In Corrupt, we saw an orchestrated plan to manipulate MPs through the lobbying system. Some were more susceptible than others to what was a clandestine scheme. This new novel speculates about politics, the car industry, global business, money laundering and the effects of big business upon Members of Parliament. It can get very messy. Click on the cover for more information.

Raven's Card

I remember some of this from researching one of my novels, linked to the Saint Petersburg moves of the then young Putin.Bank Rossiya now has UK sanctions. It was one of the hundreds of enterprises that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) financiers used to funnel the party gold away during the great sell-off of the Russian state. Dmitri Lebedev is chairman of the Board of the bank and a good buddy of Putin.

It is no secret that Sergei Pugachev, The 'Frenchman' who lived in Chelsea and is often referred to as Putin's Banker knows how to move money around. Just check the list of clients he advised, to get a clue about the scale of his operation. 

I'm guessing that the money moves are far ahead of the available sanctions.

An example is Sberbank, the largest financial institution in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, which Putin decided to make a government asset in 2020. He bought, for the state, 50% + 1 share of it to control the entire mechanism. Useful if push comes to shove.

I recollect that Putin offered a group of his buddies land near Krasnodar Krai, close to his own dacha. Of course, Putin's own dacha is no shack, set in Gelendzhik, Krasnodar Krai. Some of the Russian Press deny that this even exists, citing a US-based propaganda smear. 

But looking at drone coverage, the main residence is more than 190,000 square feet, and it sits on some 27 square miles of land—larger than the island of Manhattan. The associated compound hosts a variety of other amenities: an arboretum with rare trees plus a greenhouse, said to be tended by some 40 gardeners; twin helicopter pads; a subterranean ice hockey rink; extensive vineyards that produce an exclusive wine served at Kremlin events; a 27,000-square-foot tea house for guests; and an outdoor amphitheater for concerts. 

A tunnel that accesses the beach doubles as a bunker. It also features a special chamber cut into the cliffside that serves as a “tasting room” with a view of the sea.

How to tell it's an illicit party

money to burn?

I see London stocks rose in early trade, underpinned by solid results from oil giant BP according to Sharecast. BP are making around £350 per second from the oil price hikes. Shell similarly so. 

I thought ETRM (Energy Trading Risk Management) software and dealing was supposed to smooth the effect of energy price fluctuations, but instead we see corporate effects (good for shareholders) and domestic effects (bad for consumers). 

I thought I'd run a quick test of what would happen if I switched provider now (ie by-passed the so-called Energy Price cap)

My old energy bill was about £1200, and my new price could be one of the following:

That's around £3,820-3,850 per year or significantly more than I pay at the moment.

Of course, I'd be bonkers to 'switch' at the end of my current contract 31-March-2022, so, along with 22 million other consumers, I'll go onto the Price Cap instead. 

That way it will 'only' be around £1,971 per annum. A Price Cap rise of £693, although I was on a fixed tariff which used to give me cheaper fuel. 

 I wonder how they have the nerve to call it a price cap, when it is planned to go up again in October? 

Another example of not taking back control.

UPDATE:

I looked at the New York Mercantile Exchange NYMEX predictions for short term oil prices. The spread is so greats doesn't look as if they have a clue. Note the spread of the pricing (in red) on my two main charts.

Zwifting up Mont Ventoux

Not the fastest time ever - which appears to be under one hour, but I'll still call it respectable fun to do the whole 4,844 feet/ 1476 metres climb in 95m42s. 13 miles in 95 minutes= 7.4mph, back at average of 43mph. 

 Phew, but at least going back down was somewhat faster. I broke 55mph a couple of times.

I've cut it down to the length of Grace Cathedral Hill below: