“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.
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