Bespoke Cashmere

     In a little hilltop village they gambled for my clothes, I bargained for salvation;                                        and they gave me a lethal dose. 

I love pasta. I love to stand by the stove and watch those blue flames lick at some old and worn pot while I shake salt in. I love to wait and maybe smoke and wait some more for the bubbles to begin from the bottom, earnestly waiting to get to the top. I love when boil begins to roll, and the time is ripe to pour in the dried and hard noodles. Sometimes I don’t like noodles all that much and would prefer a Rigatoni to a Fettuchini; though it is always hard for me to say no to a Pappardeli. And then there is question of sauce, and if the evening is one where I am watching the stove, then mostly the sauce is tomato; and what’s more, it is probably from a jar. Even though there are so many better sauces than the ones that come from a jar, and it isn’t that hard to boil up a homemade tomato sauce and throw in some olive and basil; sometimes I am lazy or I haven’t planned ahead. In these instances, even then, I love pasta and the jarred tomato sauce with some salt and pepper; and if I am lucky, maybe some grated cheese, but even without the grated cheese, the pasta is good.

I love to sit on a terrace at a villa in Sicily, or in the streets of Palermo Viejo when the sun is shining. Mostly during these sorts of pasta lunches there are noodles. Long ones, long and thin, that are lightly tossed with prawns and cherry tomato’s and maybe only some sort of butter reduction. Those days it is important to sit with a tall woman who will wear sunglasses through the meal, and waive her hands for another carafe of chilled white wine; a woman who will order a tiramisu even though the sun is hot and can talk about all the world. She is an important addition to these pasta lunches; but sometimes a gay Arab boy who has fled from Eygpt to Paris only to land in New York and insists on going to Bar Pitti even though I am buying will be company enough. Though pasta eating during the day needn’t be a la fresco, what if it is cold and blustery? What if it is snowing? Those days it good to be in Midtown at some ancient eatery where the wallpaper still smells like smoke and eat something in a cream sauce, any pasta will do here, as long as there is a cream sauce; and if the place is right, and the waiters dressed in all white, there will be some bacon in the cream sauce. These times it is good to be with a friend or two, but no more than that, and talk about everything that old friends want to talk about. And if it spring? When it is bright with a gentle breeze, but the excitement of being outdoors hasn’t yet settled? Those times it is good for a late lunch, around three or four, as if it were the first meal of the day, and last night was so much fun. Those are good to spend whiling away the remnants of a day never spent in a bistro with Farfalle’s tossed around with peas and carrots and maybe chipped and chopped asparaguses. Perhaps these lunches are well spent alone with a book of poems, or the newspaper; but really it is hard to substitute for a tall skinny woman who eats like a horse.

I love to eat pasta at night, when it is cold and the day has been long. After sailing across a frozen Patagonian lake and trekking underneath a glacier, what more is better than tucking away in to a plate sorrentinos; those silly and fat ravioli’s stuffed with spinach and cheese? The place will be yellow with dim lights, and there here at the bottom of the world, there will be Norweigans drunk on dark beer and altitude, just singing away. Their voices have harmony and it is just fine to look at this plate of pasta with lust. Or in the cold spring afternoon of Idaho to go home to a little cabin only lit with the heat of the wood burning stove, and cook elbows, with nothing else beside butter and Tabasco sauce, and eat the entire package, because chopping wood is fun and hypnotizing, but also tiring. I love to eat pasta in the Himalayas, because I am tired after a day spent there, and hungry, and think: how funny, is there anything more universal than spaghetti? To which a Buddhist monk in his crimson robe replies, the impermanence of this world. And we laugh and hold our forks high and let the spaghetti dance around and splash canned tomato sauce. 

Perhaps I love pasta the most when I am alone, and have the luxury of spinning it around in sauce, making sure every last piece of starch on the noodle has bonded fully with the sauce in the bowl. But that it isn’t right; I love pasta all the time. In a little house on the beach, boiling it up and sitting by candle and staring in the eyes of a woman who can make ravioli so divine. In a little place looking onto some palazzo, when the cold cover of night has settled and the waiter strips away the seal of the black cock from the house Chianti again, and smiles because this is the second bottle and the young couple may have just discovered that they are in love.

I just love pasta!

              Every step is mine

Since the beginning of my mind,

Every step is mine.

                         And though it seems

To incarcerate in labyrinthine dreams,

                       As a ramshackle fiend

Clawing at recaptured thought

                                      Processed & caught

(as if each swipe, each miss, filled with doubt)

Time as important as it were for naught.

              Every step is mine

Since the beginning of my mine

Every step is mine.

                      Were the horizon flat

And time eternal clear and just that

Were only the horizon flat.

                     Instead it is steepled

With elusory castles and people,

        Serving needs deemed feeble

Projecting upon projections

                         Off-ramps & Intersections

Fantastic fantasies with constant corrections

                     Were the horizon flat

And time eternal clear and just that

Oh, were only the horizon flat!

All that is left is the breath

This one, and the one that comes next

                        This is all that is left.

Were it as easy to deed

                   As the future, or as memory

Surely the present would be prime Property.

Though through a slippery exhale

                  This gasp, the only escapable jail; 

            Inhale, and the rest

(By dyed light & impossible shadow)           

              Drips inwardly on sails.

All that is left is the breath

This one, and the one that comes next

                        This is all that is left.

BespokeCashemere

New Delhi, India

7:47 Monday Morning 

 —  Said billionaire financier George Soros, at the World Economic Forum which opened in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday, said central banks had lost their nerve and new leadership is needed to fix the global economic crisis.

He said it was a concern that the Fed had been forced into action by the markets, and that such an approach would ultimately end in tears.

“They’re going back to the same old story that we’ve had to put up with for the last seven years, and that’s excessive monetary accommodation that takes us from bubble to bubble to bubble,” he said of the strategy to uphold the markets.

“It’s time to put an end to this, I think, very reckless way of running U.S. monetary policy.” 

Bird flu continues its march through the dense humidity of Kolkota and the surrounding regions. Reports are coming in that up to twelve men have been quarantined with bird-flu like symptoms, which are remarkably similar to flu-like symptoms. It is not clear if it is spreading southern, or if it came in from Bangladesh, but the WHO has decided that the majority of the reason for the migration is because of ducks. They are now asking for the ducks to be burned. As of now the mountains of backyard poultry stand festering in flames with counts of over one hundred thousand birds executed. Because of the highly porous borders that exist with China and Bangladesh, and because of these men who have been emitted into the hospital; many bird flu experts are treating this as nothing less than the beginning of the pandemic.

The world markets experienced a serious hiccup. D-street in Bombay suffered, though according to the reports not as badly as some of the other exchanges. There are one thousand reasons for this happening, though the conclusions that can be drawn from it are somewhat surprising: the global economy is still very coupled to America, and that this does not necessarily pose a threat to future growth, and as the papers are reporting here in Delhi, now is the chance to get in while the market breaths.

Somewhere, between these two stories there exist a level in which to draw stability in firm optimism, or conversely, to look at these reports, and think of the nearly extinct Chinese Salamander, and all the other pages of the paper and be consumed by the crushing thoughts of things ain’t how they used to be, and they ain’t getting no better. And then on the next page the Indians are opening Kashmere up for golf course development, and the miners may get those contract in Paraguay, and they have subdivided all that land past Jose Ignacio into little plots for the land owners of Brasil and Argentina to vacation on, and Chinese are building an airport to complete the cultural destruction of Tibet, and moving to Switzerland with the way the Euro is just isn’t feasible right now – and all that talk of the meek inheriting the earth sounds wrong; so wrong, it’s the meek with backyard poultry and mortgages on three houses because someone told them it was fiscally responsible.

An American at dinner last night said he was moving to slums of Bengal, because he didn’t need much that was here. Maybe that is the right idea, maybe not? Social Darwinism is an interesting idea if it can be abstracted from the sort of easy and base references to the eugenics. Social Darwinism, or rather the survival of the fittest has little application to anything beyond a checking and saving accounts, and hopefully, if we are really surviving, an account in one of the tax free havens that isolated third world nations are beginning to position themselves as; for if there is no industry, no consumption, surely the trickle down effects of attracting HNI’s to Mauritius will bolster the backwards and still colonial economy.

So maybe at the end of this, there is something more to accumulation and consumption, maybe at the heart of it there is survival in its most base terms. Perhaps through this, comes some greater justification for a life spent auctioned off to an employer, and those bits of free time that speckle the hazy horizons of a life spent weren’t really what life was, or even what was enjoyed, they were unproductive hours, lost capitalization and so on and so forth.

It seems that this could pose as an answer to the question that Bespokecashmere set out to find: the essential spiritual and mystical element of 21^st century capitalism. Though it is unsatisfactory, because pulling the yacht into the deep water harbor in the Marquise Islands may not have any more spiritual capital than drinking fetid water in Kenya’s slums, and if the two are the same, why bother working, or even not working?

Sarkozy, BespokeCashmeres’ current fashion icon, has invited Sen and Stiglitz to France in an attempt to redefine the current metrics of economic growth to include more metaphysical ideas about mans purpose and his quality of life. Perhaps after a few weeks at Versailles, the French will once again have provided an answer.