“He gave up drinking and decided to enjoy women–but from a distance” (18th October 2006)

“He gave up drinking and decided to enjoy women–but from a distance”. Close enough to enjoy the petals without risking the thorns. “The Artist and Model I (1919) shows Munch and his model facing the viewer. Both artist and model are in uncomfortable proximity—claustrophobic and silent rather than intimate.The model’s face is in shadow and has become mask-like. In these years Munch clarified what he considered to be the core of the dissatisfaction in relations between men and women. Men need distance from women to feel powerful but this causes women to suffer; women need men to be close in order to feel powerful but this causes men to suffer.” Alternatively, as Helena and Rosa’s countryman Anton Chekhov would have it, “A woman, deprived of the company of men, pines. A man, deprived of the company of women, becomes stupid!” How true. How many times I have demonstrated the truth of this myself. As Boris Pasternak wrote in Mary Magdalene, “As soon as night descends we meet. Remorse my memories releases. The demons of the past compete, and draw and tear my heart to pieces. Sin. Vice. And madness. And deceit. When I was slave of men’s caprices, and when my dwelling was the street. The deathly silence is not far. A few more moments only matter, which the inevitable bar. But at the edge, before they scatter, in front of thee my life I shatter, as though an alabaster jar.”  

On bus to work last night, gorgeous black haired Latina(?) with friend, blue jeans, beige jacket, grey brown silk negligee top over massive huge breasts, I looked several times before they got off before Selfridges. The swell of that cleavage. No fighting. I have a Russian friend. She drinks too much, and smokes too much, and I love her too much. I have also not spoken to her for months. She was my sumptuous Siberian princess. My Siberian Cleopatra. 

If you walk into a high street bar in Vienna and find scantily-clad women lounging around, you know you can take them into a back room and fuck them. If you walk into a Berlin bar & find scantily-clad women lounging around, you know you can take them up into a bedroom and fuck them. That is why when people stumble into the Scotsman by mistake, especially Europeans, and find all these scantily-clad women sitting around, they can be forgiven for thinking the girls are there for more than dancing. After many visits to Berlin, searching in vain, I finally found a good old fashioned London-style strip club. The girls outnumbered the men, true, as they always do in Europe—I have never ever solved the conundrum where do all the men go in Berlin? In Vienna? In Brussels? In London you can go into the Nag’s Head, Old Axe, Scotsman, White Horse, anywhere, and find it rammed with men ogling the handful of dancers, whereas in Europe you will almost always find yourself the only man there, outnumbered ten to one by the girls who always sit there looking at you, which surely is the wrong way around?—but even here when the girl stepped off stage & sat at the bar with me, she offered me a private dance for 50 Euros or sex for 80! There is nowhere in Berlin that does not offer you sex. Even what you think is just a strip club. It has not changed so much since Cabaret Kit Kat Club days. Obviously, I made my excuses and left, as they say. 

 ********Death can come at any moment. If I had three minutes to live, I could think of no nicer way to spend it than one last dance from one of my favourite Flying Scotsman girls. A love letter to the FS. 

For me, for a girl to be a dancer is the greatest thing in the world. And to not be crude but to use my favourite description, a sex dancer. I revere opera singers, violinists, pianists, and actresses, but I worship no one like I do sex dancers. Wine, women and song.

If only I could have back all the thousands of pounds I have wasted on strippers and drink over the years I would go out and spend it all on strippers and drink (17th October 2006)

If only I could have back all the thousands of pounds I have wasted on strippers and drink over the years, I would go out and spend it all on strippers and drink. Our sad tawdry addictions are the best of us. If I did not have things to be sadly addicted to, I would kill myself. Our vices are the best of us. They are when we glow brightest and most brilliant. Oscar Wilde would not be celebrated today, would not have the West End full of his plays, would not have his own statute in Adelaide Street and his own stained (of course) window in Westminster Abbey if not for his vice. To watch young women take their knickers off on a stage. What a sad, empty experience, but as sad, empty experiences go, one of the absolute best. And at the Scotsman it has been refined to its most pure and simple state. The Nag’s Head and the Old Axe could be this good, but are not. Dodgy doorman demanding an apparently arbitrary amount of pound coins in their hand before they will let you in, body searches for concealed..what? An endless stream of 20 or 30 girls constantly asking for private dances. The fact that the FS does not offer private dances seems to me one of the most beautiful things about it. Anyway, if any of my Scotsman girls gave me a private dance I think I would die. It would be too much, after all this time longing for them. 

So a Journal about the FS pub, and yet so much of what occurs there must remain unsaid, sub judice. 

People criticise the FS because nothing is spent on it to modernise it, but that seems to me the knub of its absolute charm. It is like stepping back into Victorian London. With the Thatcherite revolution, the Millenium, the old Soho basement strip clubs were replaced by the mirrors and champagne and poles of the Stringfellows, and Sophisticats, and For Your Eyes Only, and we were told it is all right to go to strip clubs now, because they had gone upmarket, and respectable. Since when should sex be respectable? Sex should be down and dirty and sleazy or what is the point of it at all. The FS shines out like a beacon in the Stygian gloom, a glowing candle in the peasouper fog, by having resisted the tide. It is as close as you can get to the old Soho experience. It is like a fly trapped in amber. It is a Lost World at the bottom of a hole on a high South American plateau, where Tyrannosaurus Rex still roams and Pterodactyl still fly in the sky. It is the Pterodactyl brought back to London and escaping and circling above the Geographic Society against a Full Moon. 

KARL KRAUS. “Why do I always act so dumb, seem to fuck things up for fun. Just can’t help behaving, as if my head needs rearranging”. It is always something exotic, and steamy. Exotic, steamy, King’s Cross.

I am decadent and rotten (16th October 2006)

I am decadent and rotten. I can lust after the great sex dancers of the Flying Scotsman, as much as I lust after the great pianists, Irina Botan, Mihaela Ursuleasa, Valentina Igoshina, Nadia Giliova; the great violinists Tatiana Burman, Janine Jansen, the great opera singers Elena Prokina, Barbara Frittoli, Anna Caterina Antonacci, Stefania Bonfadelli. Is this bad of me? Is this wrong of me? “Saw the same two men on the Cally Road” This will be my Die Fackel. This will be my Simplicissimus. Devoted to the Flying Scotsman pub, the Wigmore Hall, English National Opera, the Black Hole of Calcutta pub, the Lemon Tree. After my great depression of these last few weeks, I see now that depression was the chrysalis, in which some metamorphosis was taking place, to give birth to this beautiful butterfly. Nana. It seems sad, but as sad experiences go it is one of the best. Men lusting after women is the engine of the world. 

Decorated all over by pictures of the Anna Friel Lulu. I live in a lush, overgrown, tropical paradise. I push through the great ferns and fronds, brushing the black train soot off the leaves, till I find the door of the Scotsman, and surreptitiously disappear inside, into the wonderland within that scarcely anyone passing by can imagine. How many times I myself passed by this door without it occurring to me what went on within. All those wasted years of my life! 

Some days I think I am going to go in that door and find just a normal pub, like a Wetherspoon’s or an All Bar One, and I will realise I dreamed the whole thing. It will be like the wardrobe that the children went through to enter their snowy Narnia, but then one day just becomes—a wardrobe. 

“Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Wedekind (1864-1918) German playwright, who began his career working in business and in a circus. He became an actor and singer, and a playwright. The plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit), 1893 and Die Busche der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), 1904 depict a society riven by the demands of lust and greed reinforcing his main thesis that the repression of sexuality results in perversion and tragedy. The two plays were later staged together as the Lulu plays.” “All Wedekind’s plays, with their sex-ridden men, women and children, their gentlemen crooks, and their grotesque yet vivid cranks, typify the feverish spirit of the years before 1914. Perhaps less shocking now to our society they remain valid statements of repressed and thwarted sexuality.” Information from The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre and The Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Repressed, and thwarted sexuality! My constant and dearest companions and bedfellows! You mean sexuality comes in any other kinds? Thus due to my bizarre and troubling psychopathology, my mummy never loved me, I was dropped on my head as a baby, or something, I am a Lost Boy, repressed and thwarted, my Eros bends instead, during interludes, to the butterflies and the nightingales of the Scotsman, my Midnight Bell. But increasingly I find the interludes are becoming longer and more enjoyable, and I do not want the real Acts to begin again. The interludes between the real thing are becoming more real to me than the real thing, and the real thing seems not worth a light. My life becomes one long dark pleasurable interlude between womb and tomb. It used to be my cure for a broken heart. Now it has become where my heart most wants to be. I cannot imagine loving any girl who was not a Salome dancing for Herod, or a Mata Hari. Wouldn’t it be great to take a nightime picture of the Bell & use it as my cover page for The Serpent’s Egg! I want my Flying Scotsman website to be suffused with Anna Friel’s Lulu, and with Salome, and with Nana, and with heady steamy sensuousness. Cloying, overpowering, romantic nihilistic sweetness. Tension, Eroticism, Repulsive Pathology. “The most over-perfumed drama in the language” “‘Where is she who gave herself unto the Captains of Assyria, who have baldricks on their loins, and tiaras of divers colours on their heads?” I want it to be filled with cut and paste things from all around me. The fuggy atmosphere. As Black Narcissus helped me over the madness of losing Pooky, maybe the new Serpent’s Egg may help me over the madness of losing —–. 

You’ve got to hide your love away; though it is the most natural thing in the world to want to sing it from the rooftops. Each man kills the thing he loves. They are all Salomes, dancing for King Herod. 

I have always centred my life around the great train stations: Munich Hauptbahnhof, Wien Westbahnhof, Berlin Zoo, Brussels Gare du Midi, in London, Charing Cross and King's Cross. I am so pleased Eurostar is now coming to King’s Cross. Will the Flying Scotsman survive? They are the black smokers on the ocean floor around which life congregates.

You can stick your Stringfellows & your Sophisticats—the sexiest strippers in London are the Scotsman girls (15th October 2006)

You can stick your Stringfellows & your Sophisticats—the sexiest strippers in London are the Scotsman girls. Of course, it goes without saying London’s and the British Empire’s great gift to the world is the strip pub, and out of all them—White Horse, Nag’s Head, Old Axe, Browns, Griffin, Queen Anne—the Flying Scot is far & away the best. The “Menu of the Day” list of girls is disturbingly reminiscent of Jack the Ripper’s victims’ board at the Ten Bells. In the space of twenty yards King’s Cross used to boast Housmans bookshop, The Flying Scotsman, and the gloriously sleazy Scala Cinema. The Scala Cinema alas is no more, but thankfully these other two great treasures of the British Empire remain. Tenseness, eroticism and repulsive pathology. Fine for a Jimmy Riddle but those needing a Tom Tit should look elsewhere. 

Watching the Electro video, then Eric Thoneick Love Sensation and Aaron Smith Dancin, I got an erection, and it reminded me again it is really about time I went back to cinema. *********The black depression of recent weeks seems to have receded, to be replaced by such a soft, warm, deep longing and yearning. I am almost molten from wanting her. Also I feel a bit freer and happier. The darkness has receded a little, for a while. “ 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.'” Talk about the girls being great actresses. Like Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs P Campbell. When I see them on stage I am seeing Anita Berber, Mata Hari, Josephine Baker. Every dance is a mini-drama. Tense, erotic, pathological. I want to write a magazine reviewing their performances like an opera magazine would Maria Callas at Covent Garden. Yet it seems more personal, and to talk about them by name seems impertinent, and to betray a secret. Write about Karl Kraus a lot and his attitude to the sexuality of women. Goncourt. One skirts around one’s feelings. One beats around the bush. One does not name one’s fears or one’s loves. I want curling flowers down the side of my page. THE SERPENT’S EGG will be my life’s labour, my Samuel Pepys’s Diary. Talk about my love of 20,000 Streets Under the Sky. Talk about my scopophilia. 

THE SERPENT’S EGG 
A Journal about The Flying Scotsman pub, and Other Things 

A general introduction then underneath it in boxes to left and right: ANITA BERBER, JOSEPHINE BAKER, MATA HARI, the Showgirls Guardian article. A site dedicated to the tense erotic pathology of watching sex dancers. SALOME. Anna Friel’s LULU. How often I used to go to King’s Cross for Housman’s bookshop, for their science fiction and their Karl Marx and their Situationist and Anarchist literature, and passed by that old ramshackle pub over the road that looked like it had closed a long time ago without barely giving it a second look. How many hours of my misspent life I spent in the darkness of the Scala Cinema, watching Godard triple bills, Russ Meyer triple bills, Bertolucci triple bills, without realising what delights were in the pub just next door. Can I even imagine a time when I didn’t drink? After loving the Otto Dix picture of Anita Berber for so long I went to see the Berber film Anita: Dances of Vice there, and though there were only about ten people in the vast 2,000 seat auditorium, some man who looked like Arthur Miller came and sat right down next to me in the back row and proceeded to slowly slowly creepy creepy spider creep his hand towards my arm, trying to touch me. At the moment his finger touched the back of my hand I asked him to leave me alone; of course I did. You doubt me? He soon went down the front of the cinema & no doubt tried his luck with some other pretty young boy, before, bizarrely, about 40 minutes later coming & sitting back by me.

“How are you?” the stunning tall blonde Amazonian (Moldovan) girl smiled to me. “Thou hast what’s left of me” I said (14th October 2006)

“How are you?” the stunning tall blonde Amazonian (Moldovan) girl smiled to me. “Thou hast what’s left of me:” I said. “For I am now sunk so low from what I was, thou findst me at my lowest watermark. The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes are all dried up, or take another course: What I have left is from my native spring; I’ve still a heart that swells in scorn of fate, and lifts me to my banks.” “OK” she said, a little hesitant now. I ploughed on. “Already, Death, I feel thee in my veins. I go with such a will to find my lord that we shall quickly meet. A heavy numbness creeps through every limb, and now tis at my head; my eyelids fall, and my dear love is vanished in a mist. Where shall I find her, where? Oh turn me to her, and lay me on her breast!–Caesar, thy worst. Now part us if thou canst.” She was visibly moved by my oration, and had to rush to the other side of the room so as not to let me see her crying. I purchased another pint. 

Like there can be sudden changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, in February this year my soul suddenly became completely pointed towards —–, and despite the catastrophe, despite my Actium, despite my Black Night of Downfall, my soul remains immovably pointed in her direction all of eight months later. Other women–Pamela, Melani–have come along and with their magnetic attraction have been able to flicker my pointer a fraction towards them for a short while, but it has never been strong enough to keep me from my overwhelming attaction to —–. Even if Sylvia came back that would not change anything. 

I made my first post on londonstrip last night, with the Karl Kraus quote about women being an acceptable substitute for masturbation but it requiring a lot of imagination. I do not want to throw away hundreds of pounds going all the way to Brussels and Berlin again. I want to use this money to keep paying off my cards, leaving me with money for —–. Maybe in April for Dalayaman’s Salome I will go to Berlin but not before. 

I want that Libertines world, that Hogarth world, that Dowson world. “The sight of a whore is profoundly thrilling to a man”. It has been three days since I last saw —– and already it feels like an eternity. It feels so long since I last saw her. My life is just going through the boring motions, work, work, work. The only thing that gives it a spark is my writing, and time spent with a loved one if such a thing were ever possible for me. 

“They rage there as at meat in a menagerie” The introduction to Pandora’s Box. It was going to see Lulu at King’s Cross that I discovered and fell into the world of strip clubs like falling down a rabbit hole into wonderland. They’ve even, coincidentally, got an Alice. It was a treasure to stand there watching all the posh theatre goers coming in in their suits and mink coats and pearls and their mouths dropping open when they saw the half naked girls walking around, and then quickly turning around and leaving. To the uninitiated, they must have thought they had walked into a brothel. One of the great theatrical events in recent London history for that reason, and why I also supported the idea of the ENO relocating to a King’s Cross base. I cannot believe it was a year before I went back to the Flying Scotsman, and a further year before I went back again. Finally, this time the combination of Lucky, Anya, Vicky, Czech Sylvia–who I would continue to regard as my Magic Four for years to come–plus T-- “If loving you is wrong I don’t want to be right” and Thais dancing to the Kinks Lola (people say the quality of girls is bad which baffles me, where on any stage in the world would you see six such sexy women as this?), blew several fuses in my mind. As usual I always believe I affect the weather, and when I went to leave I found London consumed in pitch blackness as there had been a power cut, and I was sure it was me, it was me that had caused this, and I had to walk all the way back to Charing Cross–and I have never been the same since. Since then it has provided me with several of “those high moments that persuade us to put off suicide”, whereas the Nag’s Head, the Old Axe, the Queen Anne, the Griffin, Browns, White Horse, Rainbow, never have. Only in time did I venture out & let go of my comfort blanket and explored these other strip pubs but found nothing that could match the visceral excitement of the Flying Scot. Things that come to you by accident are usually the best. 

OK I did great to “save” £900 in ten weeks but that is over now (13th October 2006)

OK I did great to “save” £900 in ten weeks, but that is over now. I am going to go wild again now. I cannot waste these gorgeous dark witching months. Forget Berlin. There is so much to taste here in London. That break has renewed my taste for it. “There’s really no way to reach me.” What I want to achieve in my books is simplicity. Strippers remind me of Anita Berber, Josephine Baker, Mata Hari. They are Salome dancing for dirty old man Herod so she can get to kiss the lips of John the Baptist.

What am I going to do all day? (11th October 2006)

What am I going to do all day? My life feels so bereft and empty without —–, knowing I cannot even see her again for at least a week. I have got just £2 in my pocket. I am Bob and she is Jenny. My obsession with her is ruining me.

I write books about a chronic inability to relate to people or to talk to them or to form relationships of any meaningful kind (3rd Oct 2006)

I write books about a chronic inability to relate to people or to talk to them or to form relationships of any meaningful kind. About life lived with no companionship whatsoever even though much may be offered. AUTISMUS. BLACK NARCISSUS. THE COLD ICY AIR OF THE MOUNTAINS. CASANOVA. NOT OF —–. I go through life with no companionship, even though —– offered me companionship and I threw the chance away. The chance to get to know another human being, and to be known by another human being, and I threw it away. “The harder we search for someone else, the more likely we are to find ourselves.” “But it is not Turgenev’s writing that interests Dessaix most, it is his life. Specifically, the 40 years Turgenev spent in supposedly chaste devotion to mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, trotting around Europe after her—and her husband—like a fuddy-duddy lapdog”. “He puts off visiting sites and is ultimately uninterested in peeking under the sheet to discover if Turgenev slept with his muse”. “The greatest of the 19th-century novels always centred on the journey towards that moment when one person is known by another, and is transfigured—or believes she is transfigured, or wants to be transfigured—by intimacy. From Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte to Tolstoy, novelists created and strengthened our faith in the absolute power of the love relationship to transform a life for good or ill”. “The American novelist Richard Yates died in 1992 with few of his books in print. His life was ‘a uniquely cheerless undertaking’…Yates ‘staggered from one badly paid teaching job to another, living in unbelievably squalid apartments and somehow writing further novels.” 

You wait so long for something special to happen in your life, that when it does, you just watch it in amazement & do not realise you have to make a move to catch it before it is gone and lost. A man on a desert island for 36 years finally sees a ship sailing by and is so shocked it is gone before he realises he should do something to make it stop. It is clear I have got to back and f–k either Demi or Pamela to cope with the pain of —–. I haven’t had sex since…Francesca on the 13th July, and both Francesca & Pamela the week before that. A lonely man, who never talks, just stands quietly on his own in the corner. When the girl he loves and pines for is just a few feet away on the other side of the pub, ready for him to talk to all night long if he wished, but still he stays on his own in the corner, talking to no one. 

I am Ernest Dowson, wandering around Europe after his rejection by Adelaide, suffering the torture of the damned. That is how I like to be. Pining for —–. Longing for —–. Bleeding for —–. I had a chance to get into her life and I let it go. 

“But despite his literary success, Crane was a profoundly tormented man. Poetry sustained him in a life that otherwise teetered on the brink of collapse. When he wasn’t writing, he spent much of his time engaged in fleeting homosexual encounters and alcohol binges. In 1932, three years after meeting Lorca, Crane committed suicide by leaping from a ship into the Caribbean”. 

I am a broken man. —– can see that now.

When I feel so broken and sad like I did last night & now I need to go on from the Scotsman to the cinema to lose myself in porn & that high (2nd October 2006)

When I feel so broken and sad like I did last night & now, I need to go on from the Scotsman to the cinema to lose myself in porn & that high, and on that high, dangerously excited, to go on to see Demi or Pamela. I need to see someone to take my mind off —–. And then straightaway I am right back into my old life and nothing will have changed whatsoever! Friday night 7pm I had another missed call from Olga. I definitely need to lose myself in the spiritual high of porn and whores to get my mind off the intense sadness of my relationship with —–. That means Berlin may have to wait till April or May. I didn’t try to talk to —– or buy her a drink, because I just want things to settle down between us, which started to happen at the end, when she let her body rest against mine & massaged my shoulder, so that I will feel OK about going to see her in Plumstead on the 18th November, which after all is only SIX WEEKS away! 

I am a dreamy boy, who lives in a world of his own. I am Ernest Dowson, seemingly always submerged in a dream. He spent all his money on drink and whores. He suffered the torture of the damned because his beloved Adelaide did not love him back. I need to go to see Demi and Pamela, to try to console me over my broken heart with —–. “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion” But all the time I am fucking Demi or Pamela it will be really —– I am imagining is beneath me.

Of course I cannot travel to Berlin in the New Year (1st October 2006)

Of course I cannot travel to Berlin in the New Year. Especially when the one I love is behind me in London. Alone, alone, alone. Always alone. I have always been alone, and I always shall be. And yet travelling can mark the end of one period of your life, and when you come back you can find everything feels different, and you feel very liberated from them. Maybe after going to Berlin I will feel I can start again and turn over a new page, which I will not do just by staying the whole time in London, trapped in the same routine, silently morosely standing in the back corner of the Scotsman, longing for —– and never even going over to talk to her. This year has been ALL about —–. That would be a good title! ALL ABOUT —–.