The Calcutta was very packed even for a Friday [7th October 2006]

The Calcutta was very packed even for a Friday. I had 3½ pints before going to the Wigmore. To be honest, Frittoli was more voluptuous than I was expecting, in a three-layered black dress covered with silver diamante patterns, and I had to revise my plan to leave at the interval. She was gorgeous and fantastic. A special honour to see her and yet in my mind I conflated her and -- together so it felt I was looking and worshipping both of them at the same time, while I muttered away still talking to --. I was reminded very much of the Prokina night when she turned and looked at me at the end. "I still love him". I had a Becks in the bar downstairs, much-changed!, while reading about Pete and Kate. I will perhaps go to Sunset tonight after the Bell, if the Bell is no good. If I leave the Bell quickly I won't really be spending anything extra...? I have got my £69 gas bill and my £136 TV licence renewal bill in! Forget Berlin in the New Year. Though I think a lot about Alla. I have to keep drinking and living madly like last night. Then I can potter around town with a silly drunken smile on my face muttering to --. Better than staying in doors brooding and crying and feeling suicidal. I wish to destroy myself with drink. I plan to drink myself to death. 

I never even noticed, last night was Egon Schiele night. Things always start to become more erotic from this point on. Today is the first anniversary of being in Frankfurt and getting train to Nuremberg for the great Saturday night at Caribic and that girl in the Pils having  her stockings mauled by that man. It is the third anniversary of going with Maria in the Brussels windows before going to Munich and meeting Susi the next night. 

As I was leaving the flat last night, the little blonde Polish bob had just come in & was checking her postbox. She did not turn around but I said hello anyway and she turned around with such a big lovely smile & said hello back & she looked so gorgeous & I was glad I did something friendly. I was rewarded by meeting English teacher and Greek girl on the bus & having a good night in general. The more you give out the more you get back. It is difficult when you are in the depths and coils of a depression, but I hope to meet my Rilkean turning point, and bounce back. Given her flowers, Frittoli bowed low & all the rainwater from the flowers spilled onto the stage. Everyone laughed & she pretended to shower the front row with it. When she came out for her encore she very exaggeratedly stepped round the water & pretended to slip over.  A true star, reminding me of Jochen Kowalski catching the bouquet with one hand at the Komische Oper. 

As I entered the hall the ticket girl smiled at me "we are sold out so no one can cheat" and we grinned at each other. You will not get out of your depression by being moody and cold, you will only do it by being warm and friendly, and trying to smile and be nice to people, and then get warmth back. November 18th looms hugely on my horizon. In the meantime if I do not see her at the Bell I know I can always go back and have a good night at the Sunset. 

Thunder at 6am. Now torrential rain [30th Sept 2006]

Thunder at 6am. Now torrential rain. Winter is finally coming. I am autistic. I am Stephane in Un Coeur en Hiver. I am Will Penny. I am the Consul. I am Noodles. It was so good watching that Stephen Fry programme about depression. Even though he had just been to a party and was laughing and joking and was the life of the party, when he got home he cried his eyes out and thought of ways to kill  himself. Richard Dreyfus has only coped by being on medication for the last 30 years. Many people find it hard to cope with their minds.

*************

I am so ridiculously nervous about meeting -- again tonight. Most people have got lots of different kinds of relationships, as Sarah would say. I do not. I have only my longing for -- and nothing else. -- is everything. I just know how I will feel when I wake up Sunday morning with a hangover, depressed, so so empty, feeling so worthless and pointless because I am alone and without her. I dread it--yet what is the alternative? If I stay in and do not go, I will feel just as empty. At least for a couple of hours I will have the intensity of losing myself in the depravity, of diving deeper into darkness. Into the Libertines, Hogarthian, Crane Wine Menagerie world. What I did was perverse with --. I eventually got over the black psychological meltdown with Black Bob, I eventually got over the black psychological meltdown with Pooky, I eventually got over the black psychological meltdown with Susi and Irina. I suppose I will eventually get over the black psychological meltdown with --, but it is hard when temptation is always there, when she is so close. I am so unhappy, because I am alone, because I did not take a chance with --. Falling in love is awful. I have been bombed to ruins again. What is there for me to look forward to? Just writing with cold blue hands in cold stoveless rooms high in the icy mountains. Complete emptiness and hollowness. 

I was always the one who wanted to stay in the corner and not get involved. Fine.

Perhaps I will abandon the January visit to Berlin as well, and instead aim myself at April for Katarina Dalayman's Salome.

I got to the Calcutta at 4 Wednesday and I knew it was ominous when I felt how easy the beer was going down [28th Sept 2006]

I got to the Calcutta at 4 Wednesday and I knew it was ominous when I felt how easy the beer was going down. It was one of those rare special days when the beer goes down so easy. Up to the Scotsman after two pints. Didn't take me long to realise -- was not there as I did not hear her laughter. A new barmaid! Very sexy brunette. A good line up, Lucky, Vicky, Amanda, Helena, Tequila, Nicky, Crystal and Aussie Victoria. -- gave me a nice welcome back, where you been? Where you been I said. In italy? That was fucking July! Where have you been going she said. My mum's house. She was pulling shocked faces. My mind is boggling! After she danced she came & stood in the dark centre corner with me talking. She has got a private party tonight, Tilly's. Next time I will ask her to put me on the list. I got there about ten to six I think, and -- finished at 7. The last two times she collected she leaned right against me till I put the money in. After she left a little brunette girl came in, and mentioned she was a better dancer than them and had better tits. I pulled her back and stopped her from leaving. And after that she was with me for 30? 40? mins. Me with my hand on her tits and she with her hand down my pants around the base of my cock. Francesca, she is in love with Jazmine. We made a deal, she will help me with -- and I will help her with Jazmine. Helena was grinning at me as she collected. Because of all this, I completely lost count of my number of pints, but it was a lot. And this was even before I started watching the Levski v Chelsea game on tv! I think I left before half time, and fell asleep on the 87 home and had to get one back. 

Straight away I am reminded how attractive this world is, and how much I love it. 

I always have to have this twisted painful sado-masochistic relationship with women [27th Sept 2006]

I always have to have this twisted, painful, sado-masochistic relationship with women--like --, Melani.  Where initial fondness and attraction turns to anger and bitterness and incomprehension. Like Stephane with Emmanuelle Beart in Un Coeur en Hiver. Like Will Penny. How close I came to Lotta's fitta, to Covadonga's, to --'s. To get so close to those lovely soft nubile women's bodies, to be so close to being let in, and then to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I was absolutely like Stephane with Emmanuelle Beart with --. Let her know I like her, make her want me, and then just coldly stand there and let her go. 

Yes I miss those nights at Atlantic City and Sexyland and Golden Gate & Mon Cheri & Monte Carlo & Ciro & Pour Platin and Empire and the Bell and Sunset Strip & Sunset Cinema but you cannot keep doing it all the time [25th Sept 2006]

Yes I miss those nights at Atlantic City and Sexyland and Golden Gate & Mon Cheri & Monte Carlo & Ciro & Pour Platin and Empire and the Bell and Sunset Strip & Sunset Cinema, but you cannot keep doing it all the time. You cannot do it every week, 52 weeks a year. Yes I am missing out on all those experiences and all those heady nights and all those new people like Janet or Martini that might be arriving--but it is great to have some months when you do nothing, and then have some months when you go back to it. You have to deny yourself some things for a while, in order to enjoy them again. The longer I leave it the more I will appreciate it when I go back to my Pope life, my Francis Bacon life, my George Grosz life. The Broken World. The Shining Road. Once again I pore over the weather forecasts. For signs, auguries, of when the right time will be to resume my former sinful profligate life. I divine things from the weather. My sexuality is linked to the weather as much as it is linked to finance and to justice and to cathedrals. I will indulge my sexuality when the weather indicators are right, and the financial indicators are right, and the scales of justice feel right, and when in the cathedral it feels right. 

I love the wicked women. I have met some women I could trust in that broken world, Lela, for example, Ana Maria, Pamela. Diana in Berlin or Riccarda. Probably not Iga, as much as I love her! You can genuinely touch someone in that world and be touched by them, I think. I always go into that world looking for love, as I think they are the only women I could ever love. The clink of gold in the glass. The Tallulahs are probably no more cynical than the Esmeraldas. They are only nice to you as long as you are filling their glass with gold. Still, I think you can meet some exceptions, when something genuine passes between you, with Susi, with Janet, with --. And if I am wrong, then it does not matter. Fleetingly, it felt nice to real there was something real between us, if only in the blink of an eye. It is those moments that you keep go out looking for. That is what you keep gambling for, throwing so much money down on the roulette table for the very occasional moment when you get back more than you put in. That is what you keep trawling the broken world for, those fleeting moments when eye meets eye and some spark of electricity passes between you, and that current brings you back to life, for a couple of hours, or for one night, at least. That is what the poems of Hart Crane speak to me of: "The flesh assaults outright for bolts that linger". How you put on your beer goggles, so everything looks magical, everyone looks beautiful and desirable, and everyone seems to find you beautiful and desirable in return. If it is all commerce, simply, then no matter. There are just those brief moments when it seems so real, comes so close to being real, that it is as good as real. 

In every city there is Helen of Troy locked up somewhere in a room. She lives on like Orlando, like Emilia Makropolus. You go out every night searching for her, as David Tennant's Casanova always searches for Laura Fraser. "The sight of a whore is profoundly thrilling to a man". As a scopophiliac, sight is everything to me, and I lose myself in that world. For two months I have had to abstain completely and withdraw from it, only so that I might return refreshed and enjoy it anew. "There is only one woman in the world for me, you know that". "Who is she? Tell me!""No. She is cruel to me." "Maybe you were cruel to her." "Ah, that's what a bleeding heart does to a man. It drips and leaks into his soul, and before long floods his soul, and saturates him, and all his thoughts and all his words and all his deeds become bloody." "What could a woman do to help such a man?" "Well, if you would just give me your hand for a moment..." "No! You're an animal!" "If you would just step into this dark corner with me for a moment..." "No! Never again! No more dark corners with you!"

How I walked away from Irina without seizing my moment. How I walked away from -- without seizing my moment. How I walked away from Susi without seizing my moment. Maybe Riccarda, too. Pamela?

I live in the Ernest Dowson world. Don’t stick your head above the parapet unless you want to get shot at. When I hear Maneater I want to see -- dancing to it. I am obsessed with her.

"As Nietzsche put it, while recovering from his intoxication with Wagner: 'What can be done well today, what can be masterly, is only what is small.'"

What a merry chase I lead people! [23rd Sept 2006]

What a merry chase I lead people! I exult in it now. How I torment them and torture them with what I get away with and STILL get away with. I used to feel chased and hunted and hounded. Now I delight in leading them on a chase after me. See if you can keep up!

Everybody was waiting for me when I first went to Europe. They already knew me and they already knew I was on my way, and they already knew the date and time of my arrival. I feel like Bourne. They know who I am and I don't. What was it I did? Who was I? Why was everyone trying to kill me? When I went to the top of the St Marks Belltower in Venice, the American kids knew me. 

Like you can tell the age of a tree by counting its rings, I can measure my life out in the number of Salomes I have seen at the opera. Just listening to songs on Berlin Energy reminds me of being in Berlin. I only asked -- and Pamela to come home with me because since then all I have done is get drunk and spend all my time in the Bell and Sunset Strip then go home and pass out.

Yes I am amused to feel like Bourne. But I also feel like Joe Orton--still getting away with it! Like Frank Wedekind, flaunting it in their faces! Pour épater le bourgeoisie. To do whatever it is I shouldn't do. I LIVE FOR THE WILD NIETZSCHEAN DIONYSIAN PLEASURE. I LIVE FOR STIRRING PEOPLE UP. I LIVE FOR DOING THINGS I SHOULDN'T. I LIVE FOR DOING DANGEROUS THINGS WHICH WILL PUT ME ON THE VERGE OF SELF-DESTRUCTION. I LIVE FOR THE SLEAZY THRILL.

Royksopp What Else Is There? Yes I owe a massive £6000. Yes my monthly interest is a massive £80. But think of those nights in Munich Atlantic City watching Susi, Irina, Patricia, Bella Rosa, Viktoriya, or in Femina with Emily. Going to Nuremberg and meeting Martina in the Pils Bar. Those nights in Berlin with Yulia, Riccarda, Iga, Diana or Arrica. Would I take any of it back? No!

I AM DEBAUCHED. Debauchery is the road to Taoist contentment. The pleasures are great. The rewards are great. 

The rewards for that £6,000 have been great.

Oh God I love to get drunk and lose it! And I always will. Whether in London or Berlin or Munich or Vienna or Brussels. I will always want to get drunk and lose it. That is the point of life. Live for the moment. Live every moment like its the last.

Why do I keep going back to the same places? For me, it is an attempt at time travel. I am trying to go back to the past & this time put right what I did wrong. I have left so much blood on the tracks, and I want to put it all right this time, with Susi, with Irina, with Viktoriya, and do the right thing  this time. Please let me have that chance. So of course all my visits become increasingly forlorn.

What a lovely 30? 45? minutes I had with Harrietta in Angelique in Vienna.

I am quietly obsessed with recording my own life.

Für Elise is nostalgia for all the beautiful Esmeraldas you have fallen in love with & who you have had to leave behind.

What the hell happened to Pink? What a loss. What a brief golden age. How can I not love all the Tallulahs and Esmeraldas I have met? What magical, never to be forgotten high, special moments they have given me.

Oh what a return it will be when it happens. October? November? How wonderful that memory is of seeing Michela dancing to Global DJs is, even though at the time it seemed so failed a visit. What happy memories those strip clubs around Europe (Munich) have given me. That is why I cannot regret the £6,000.

It's possible I could go to Berlin for one night only to see Dalayman in Salome isn’t it? Suddenly a visit to Munich (or Vienna) in December becomes possible. But I said Munich never again after January!??? It is all just memories now. That incredible Jay Z Threat night. Will life ever get any higher than that?

If I have learnt one thing in life it is that you have to take your chances--Susie, --, Irina, all of them. Clarissa. Martina. 

When you hear Afghan Whigs See About Me, how can you not want to go back to the strip clubs? Yes, but it is about going back when they are at their best---in winter, and on Saturdays, and in Berlin or Munich. The Whigs seem to exist in that same drunken world as the Libertines, and Faith Healers, and me.

There is nothing better than travelling around Europe to see my favourite opera singers [19th Sept 2006]

There is nothing better than travelling around Europe to see my favourite opera singers. While there enjoying the brothels and strip clubs and pubs as well. Travel seems the only point to life. To travel is to be held in suspension. As soon as you come to rest, everything stops and falls. You are just left waiting until you can travel again.  Between travels I will just drink and drink to make the time go faster.

I will go home today so I can get drunk while listening to music. That is all I do every day on my days off, get drunk. Just waiting for the time I can travel again. Thursday should be thundery, and Friday showers. The paper says we are heading for a period of high winds, torrential rain and abnormally high temperatures! Phnom Penh weather. It remains to be seen whether I can resist the lure of the illicit thrill during these atmospheric conditions. I do not want to go back to the Bell and Sunset Strip and Sunset Cinema and Demi and Pamela until I am also ready to travel. Even when I get September out of the way, there is still all of October, all of November, and all of December to get through! Can I really resist travelling in December? Maybe I will just pop to Brussels?  

I live for gambling, I live for saving my money in periods of abstinence just so I can blow it again on wicked women in London and Brussels and Vienna and Munich and Berlin. This boom and bust is what I live for. "What Rodin depicted in the Burghers was the birth of a specifically modern form of despair: an acceptance that there is no external source of redemption and the knowledge that one's life might not be capable of generating its own capacity for redemption. What solace is available in the face of this dilemma? One possibility is work, the unswerving devotion to a craft that so impressed Rilke. The other is the sexual promise offered by women. In his later years Rodin achieved a blissful combination of these possibilities, devoting hours and hours to making thousands of drawings of naked women, often in states of sexual rapture. 'People say I think too much about women,' he explained. 'Yet after all, what is there more important to think about?' In Milton--as in the Bible--the Fall comes after Adam has tasted Eve in all her tainted sensuality. This inverts the reality of the situation: that the lure of sex is one of the things that makes the fallen state not simply bearable but desirable. Wittingly or not, Milton provides a glimpse of a paradise that is endlessly regainable: 'Carnal desire inflaming, he on Eve/Began to cast lascivious eyes, she him/As wantonly repaid...' Rodin trained himself to draw without taking his eyes off the women who were happy to surrender themselves to him as he abandoned himself to his gaze, (William Rothenstein, to whom Rodin made the remark about the importance of women, recalls him 'caressing his models with his eyes, and sometimes too with his hands'.)" 

I abandon myself to my gaze. I have a deep attachment to Brussels, Munich, Vienna and Berlin. I used to spend all my spare money in the Bell and Sunset Strip and Soho. Now I save it all for travelling in December and January. I can moan about all the money I have wasted on sex and strippers over the past few years, but isn't that the point of life?!!!! There is nothing I would rather do with my money. I just need to control it in London so I can also enjoy the womanly delights of Berlin and Brussels and Vienna and Munich. 

"We drank hard and talked about what Debord, who drank persistently and prodigiously, had written about alcohol"

"We drank hard and talked about what Debord, who drank persistently and prodigiously, had written about alcohol. 'I admire Debord as a perfect and dedicated drinker.' We talked about how, in the early years of his career as a drinker, Debord was always in pursuit of or just arriving at a perfect point of intoxication which, unlike paid labour or any other servile activity, would reveal 'the true taste of the passage of time'. Drinking was a beautiful poetic game, with its rules and protocols. Debord devoted pages to describing this notion."

Irina suddenly leaned over to me and said to me "I'm sorry, you're a nice guy, but you drink too much" before giving me the ultimate private dance. I said to Viktoriya "You don’t like me, do you", and she exploded back with real hatred "Yes. Because you're always drunk". *****************I insist on the primacy of my own experience. My own vision. I can only be alone. I can only be in cold icy mountains. ******************Don't be unhappy, be happy! Think what immense power you have got! You have made the great separation & now live for pure Priapism. You have got money. Winter is coming. I can go to the Bell, the Sunset Strip, Sunset Cinema, Demi and Pamela. In January I can go to Berlin. This is going to  be a season of the flesh. I have got a nice little job I enjoy. I have got money coming in. I have got my own little nest. I have got a week off in December and another week off in January to go to Berlin, for La Traviata and Carmina Burana.

"Where do you live actually?" said Pamela to me. The discipline of saving money is actually a really exciting one. It has made the Bell more exciting for me. It will no doubt make Sunset Strip more exciting for me eventually. I love the things I have got away with in the past, the things I get away with now, the things I will get away with in the future. 

I have got my book-lined London home, filled with ferns, and classical music. I live like a church mouse in a little hotel earning the money to write my books, while enjoying the girls taking their knickers off to loud music, and travelling a couple of times a year to Berlin. I am still sad about --. Do what you want with your genitals, otherwise you will regret it when you're dead.

I feel an almost physical revulsion at the thought of going back to Sunset and Demi and Pamela [13th Sept 2006]

I feel an almost physical revulsion at the thought of going back to Sunset and Demi and Pamela. But what else is there, so I will eventually. When I know the pleasures I have felt in those places felt so intense. I feel a physical revulsion for going back to those nighttime Vienna places and the nighttime Berlin places. I feel a physical revulsion for spending any money when I am in this saving mode. That is good. I have become allergic to spending money when before I seemed addicted to it. I feel an almost physical revulsion for women. I am a strange man. How can -- or anyone have a relationship with a strange man like me. I am like Ralph Fiennes Spider. I only learnt how to be alone when I was a baby, and I always will be. I love places where I can be alone surrounded by loud pounding music and naked girls, that is why I love the dream world of the Scotsman and Sunset Strip so much. It is the ultimate detachment. The ultimate transcendency. The ultimate lens. The ultimate gateway to the state of bliss that is the Kingdom of Death. Ultimate nothingness. --'s finger to the lips in a hushing gesture seems a very big moment. That nervousness so intense I cannot breathe as the train nears Nuremberg & as I got off and walk along the corridor to the entrance hall, and the nervousness I felt so intense I could not breathe as i went down the steps at the Astral, I now feel when I walk to the Scotsman from the north from the 91 stop. I feel it too when I enter Sunset Cinema, hoping to find a woman being monickered, and also when I go up the models' steps. That is the high. That is the drug.

"Berlioz's unstinting lionisation of Beethoven in the pages of La Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris" [12th Sept 2006]

"Berlioz's unstinting lionisation of Beethoven in the pages of La Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris,the most important and influential music journal in 19th-century France, also played a major role in establishing him at the centre of the repertory for the concert hall." In my journal, what would I write about, who would I lionise. I would lionise the Midnight Bell, perhaps, and its dancers, extolling the virtues of Sylvia and -- and Janet above all others. Extolling them in messianic, apocalyptic, grandiose, diva-esque terms, like they are Sarah Bernhardts. Invoking Hungarian history. Giving reviews of their performances just the way one would with reviews of violinists or pianists. They are all on a stage, why not? Instead of one paragraph reviews of Anita Berber's Bethanien or Marlene Dietrich's grave, extend them into full page articles, enabling me to digress into talking about the Blue Angel, Lola, etc. Berber at the Romanisches Cafe, Tucholsky. It would be a journal devoted to the strip clubs of London, the pubs, to Berlin, and Vienna, and Brussels, and Munich. Talk about them the way you would about great opera singers of the 1880s, from the stage side box. Write a magazine where on one page there is a review of Barbara Fritoli at the Wigmore Hall on Wednesday night, and on the facing page, a review of the Flying Scotsman on Thursday night, each with equal analysis. My reviews are scurrilous and scandalous, like James Ellroy, Charles Bukowski. Winter is coming. Remember those cold icy days when I first moved in here? Remember the excitement of those Astral  nights? Miising in Action Painter film? The unable to breathe shaking with excitement as I headed down the steps not knowing what I was about to see? Remember that unbelievably huge breaasted beautiful Czech girl at the Boulevard? It is almost like a dream. I cannot believe I witnessed something so spectacularly sexy as her and made so little of it. If only I knew where she was now. 

I would like to write my own magazine like the Fackel, full of my hard-hitting sometimes scurrilous articles and reviews of London life. Write about Barbara Frittoli and the tyranny of not being able to write about the singer's beauty, and sexual allure, as if this must not be mentioned, like some guilty secret. Write about La Traviata at the ENO, a weepy opera about "some consumptive whore, when in real life whores are treated like the lowest of the low, yet here she is celebrated as something glorious". 

The fact that I have paid £600 off my Barclaycard in the space of a month shows what is possible [11th Sept 2006]

The fact that I have paid £600 off my Barclaycard in the space of a month shows what is possible. I don’t think I am going to go to Vienna in December. I think I would rather keep waiting and keep saving. So when I do travel I will have a real war chest to travel with. I was thinking in the Calcutta on Thursday that there is nothing worth spending money on except sex. If it is a choice between seeing Volver or A Scanner Darkly, or going to see a girl take her knickers off to music, then there can only be one winner. You see people who go on beach holidays, or Amalfi, and I think how bored I would be. The only holiday that means anything is in red light districts. To meet new strippers and new Esmeraldas. What is wrong with running a high debt? We will see how high my Virgin interest is when that hits in October. 

In McDonald’s most beautiful gorgeous voluptuous brunette girl, maybe 18 or 19, skin tight black top over rolls of fat and big fat huge tits, thick yellow snakeskin belt, blue jeans over fat arse, pretty pretty face, little snub nose. I could not take my eyes off her & she knew it as she finally shot me a glance as I stepped forward to order. 

Nothing in the city matters except sex, the buying and selling of it, young women stripping for you, young women lying back on the bed and opening their legs for you, men all with their cocks out in a dark porn cinema. This is the reality of my life. Vienna is still a mystery to me. With three consecutive visits to Brussels, then three to Munich, then three to Berlin, I felt I cracked the nut of all those places. I still have not achieved that with Vienna. Viennese Eroticism is very important to me. Primitive London. I am very intellectual yet I live very primitively, my animal instincts always winning out over my cerebral ones. So much drink has sozzled my brain that I doubt I have any cerebral instincts left at all. What an animal I was with Anya at the stag party; how impressed Sylvia seemed to be & so much more warm and friendly to me than she had ever been before. When people write about my life 50 years from now, they will have to write about the Calcutta, the Flying Scotsman, Sunset Strip and Carnival. About Astral, Soho Cinema, and Sunset Cinema. About Atlantic City. About Stutti Frutti, Mon Cheri, Golden Gate, Monte Carlo and Ciro.

If I do not travel to Vienna and Berlin in December and the New Year I will have no chance to meet a new Irina or Susi, Patricia or Viktoriya. Things happen when you travel. In Brussels I met Clarisse. In Frankfurt Katerina. In Berlin Erica. It is important to keep exploring. I live in a kind of Francis Bacon London. I live in the gutter like him. My writing is visceral and from the guts, full of pinks and reds and purples, like his paintings. I too am fascinated by a Pope. I am visceral and fascinated and turned on by my naked self like Egon Schiele. Do not apologise for this. Exult in it. I am priapic and I will just do it more than ever. I am saving money by not doing it so much just so I can do it more. I am going to Vienna at Christmas to fuck a couple of Viennese whores. In strip clubs every night is like Sylvester's Eve; or Walpurgisnacht. The more bawdy and raucous the better; that is why I like the Bell on Saturday nights. In London all the strip pubs are packed with men; again I ask the question, where do all the men go in Berlin? In Vienna? In Brussels?