How fantastic like on Wednesday night to be able to see girls as outrageously sexy & voluptuous & beautiful as Martina (28th April 2006)

How fantastic, like on Wednesday night, to be able to see girls as outrageously sexy & voluptuous & beautiful as Martina, as Kelly, then as Melani. How much I take that for granted. 

I’ve got a very safe sinecure in the —— Hotel which gives me the pocket money to pay my rent & to write my books, while sustaining my addictions to drinking & to strippers. Everyone at Sunset seemed cool to me Wednesday. That long unreadable look from Melani, Alison never smiling at me once, Juliana behind the bar stonily giving me two tens for a twenty without any eye contact or a smile. It is funny just as the girls at the Flying Scotsman have never been nicer to me, the ones at Sunset Strip have gone very cool. 

dook_sucks said @ 8:17pm GMT on 8th Jul My favorite physicist, Richard P. Feynman used to go to strip clubs all the time. He’d sit there and work out equations while they’d be dancing in front of him. That he could concentrate oh high level advanced physics and strippers at the same time is testament to his genius. Sorta like Sensible Erection, no? Glad to see the hawk-meister is of the same caliber. 

matt said @ 6:15am GMT on 9th Jul [Score:1 Insightful] I dunno, strip clubs are pretty good places to go to get time to think. I’ve a long history of going to them to get away from people. the Beauty of them is no one looks at you or pays you any attention at all (apart from the girls trying to convince you to have a paid private moment with them). You can just sit there with your drink, think, write, ponder, whatever, and when you look up, there’s something pleasant to cast your eyes over. Hell, you could consider them muses.

 

ALWAYS THE RESPONSE TO ATTACKS IS TO DO MORE! (26th April 2006)

ALWAYS THE RESPONSE TO ATTACKS IS TO DO MORE! FLAUNT IT IN THEIR FACES MORE & MORE! WIND THEM UP MORE & MORE! PROCLAIM “STILL GETTING AWAY WITH IT!”! Aultre ne veulx estre (No desire to be otherwise) “I know very well that I would be better off living normally, better off keeping to the straight and narrow, not to be (at the age of 30 years) as futile as Cherubino di amore for Beaumarchais (…). I know that I do not have enough respect for the law, that I am as scatterbrained as a mayfly, and as unworried as a monk, I know that I do not contribute to the good of the State but that which you do not suspect and that which will cause all serious people to faint, right up until the fifth male generation, is that I am happy and almost proud of being like this and not otherwise…. I hope that this surpasses the boundaries of decent insanity…” Letter from Félicien Rops to Emile Leclerq, 1863**************Oh I get home feeling so down & depressed. I don’t know what to do. I either go repeatedly to Flying Scotsman and Sunset Strip & derange my senses & watch strippers all night, or I stay put in the flat & let another night go by inside the four walls. What a choice. Sometimes I will force myself to Phaedra or As You Desire Me or The Gothic Imagination, but I derive no real enjoyment from it–it seems so much less real than the sex dancers & the drink. I HAVE to do the writing to earn the drunkenness. I am cut off from everybody, & that’s how I like to be, & that’s how I want to be. S—– told you she liked you. H— told you she liked you. —– told you she liked you. I AM WRITING A BOOK ABOUT SEX DANCERS. ABOUT ANITA BERBER & JOSEPHINE BAKER. I USE THEM AS MY DRUGS. Poor bus stop girl. She doesn’t realise what a resolutely silent person I am. Polish D—-, G—-, M—–, were all so warm to me until they realised I am not going to talk to them, and then they become surly, & stony faced, & contemptuous. I AM DEPRAVED. LIKE SALVADOR DALI. LIKE OSCAR WILDE FEASTING WITH PANTHERS. LIKE WITTGENSTEIN CREEPING INTO THE PRATER AT NIGHT IN SEARCH OF ROUGH TRADE. LIKE HART CRANE CRUISING THE DANGEROUS & VIOLENT MANHATTAN, BROOKLYN & HOBOKEN WATERFRONTS AT NIGHT. What do I keep going to the place for to gaze at the girls dancing? I like to lose myself in it, enter another world.***************How I stir people up, while I remain the sweet, innocent stillpoint at the centre of it all. What I am doing at the Flying Scotsman is just another drop in my experiment. It is where I am focusing my experiment at the moment. It is a lens. I must bring my scientific books back here to write my book on detachment. How G— used to like me, how M—– used to like me, how Ursula used to like me, how Shreeti used to like me, how Aureline used to like me, how pig-tailed Calcutta barmaid used to like me, "Oh you're so sweet, do you know that!" But I am in a world of my own, unreachable, impenetrable. AS UNWORRIED AS A MONK. I LOVE IT IF PEOPLE ARE BECOMING FASCINATED BY ME. I LOVE IT IF PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT ME BEHIND MY BACK. I PROVOKE THEM MORE & MORE.

Ernest Dowson and Hart Crane would both get drunk every night and usually become violent & almost insane (24th April 2006)

Ernest Dowson and Hart Crane would both get drunk every night, and usually become violent & almost insane. I am driving myself almost to insanity every night at the Flying Scotsman. So where are my poems? Try to get into the habit of going to the Scotsman just once a week, and never again on a Saturday. If I go just once a week, then I can also go into Soho afterwards, for Sunset Strip, Sunset Cinema and maybe Pamela as well. The other two days off I will concentrate on staying and writing through the night.

I always love seeing Pamela. How good it felt to be in Sunset Cinema going up & down stairs between the two cinemas with my big swollen sore cock rolling inside my trousers. The sexual charge in those places is fantastic, and now summer is coming there may be more chance of finding some girls in there, too. All artists have to throw themselves into the gutter. Face it the greatest memories of my life have come in the Astral Cinema, the Soho Cinema, and the Sunset Cinema. All the incredible hot erotic memories from those places! I drink to derange my senses & go into the dream world. From there I can go back to Soho and the Sunset Cinema. Just imagine if the Flying Scotsman did private dances as well! Thank God they do not! There is something glorious in my drunken stupidities at the Scotsman. But please–once a week! Then I will allow myself Sunset Cinema as well. Like Hart Crane cruising the violent & dangerous Brooklyn, Manhattan & Hoboken shorefronts I cannot help but going back into Soho cinemas, despite the shame & ignominy & ruin it brings on myself–because the highs are so great & so exciting! 

“…All the couples part abruptly and pull up their trousers. That’s the flâneur, caught in the spotlight, blushing perhaps but with a wry smile playing around his lips. This, at least, is Edmund White’s kind of flâneur , cruising for sex while a few yards away tourists are paying through the nose for grim dinner-dancing experiences as they float along the Seine. When White lived in Paris between 1983 and 1998, he quickly found the best places to cruise. The Palais Royal and the Tuileries gardens (especially the gravel walkways by the Orangerie) sound like delightful places for outdoor sex, though why he thought the quay near Gare d’Austerlitz would be is, frankly, beyond me. He writes: “Most people, straight or gay, think that cruising is pathetic or sordid – but for me, at least, some of my happiest moments have been spent making love to a stranger beside dark, swiftly moving water below a glowing city.” Paris: city of light, but better, city of darkness and anonymous sex. White maintains, not very convincingly and rather half-heartedly, that cruising is an extension or application of the art of the flâneur. Those practitioners and theoreticians of the art, Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, wouldn’t have had much time for that idea, and nor should we. The whole point about a flâneur is that he or she is an aimless stroller. By contrast, a cruiser is utterly directed, as Schopenhauer might have put it, towards the extinction of his desire. The flâneur's desire is much less ardent, perhaps approaching non-existence, and thus resembles the disinterested appreciation that Kant argued was characteristic of aesthetic experience.”

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

I like getting wilder & wilder. Audit Day today. The —— is going to be audited. I am going to get caned. Infernal’s From Paris to Berlin is No.4 in the charts! Reminding me so much of my travels. Also the Out of Touch, Out of Time video in the Calcutta. I love the excitement of travel. IN THE LAST TWO WEEKS I HAVE SPENT £422! I COULD HAVE GONE TO BERLIN INSTEAD & USED IT TO PAY FOR THE £165 BA FLIGHT & £225 BERLIN PLAZA FOR FOUR NIGHTS, STILL WITH BEER & KNESEPFANNE MONEY LEFT OVER! I COULD HAVE SEEN THE HEATHROW PON DE REPLAY WOMAN. THEY’VE SHOCKED US AND HELPED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD. 12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD. THE HMS BEAGLE LANDED ON THE GALAPAGOS 1835. I AM A GENTLEMAN SCIENTIST. A SYNOPSIS OF HIS LIFE’S WORK. PUBLISHING IT WAS LIKE CONFESSING TO A MURDER. I shrunk from all contact with the other children in nursery. I shrunk from all contact with other pupils at school. I shrink from all contact with people now as an adult. One of the great things about me is my blissful uncaredness: I couldn’t care what ——, or M—–, or G— think of me. I am in my private world, going there for my private reasons.

I am glad I am ruining myself & becoming increasingly mad & crazy at the Flying Scotsman (23rd April 2006)

I am glad I am ruining myself & becoming increasingly mad & crazy at the Flying Scotsman. I am deliberately becoming a grand wreck. It is part of my project to experience new things, push an experience to the extremes. “Crane wrote to a friend, “You may not think it, yet there comes a great peaceful exaltation in merely reading, thinking, and writing.” Yet this was not enough to ward off sporadic spells of intense depression; he first attempted suicide at the age of 15 by slashing his wrists and taking an overdose of sleep medication.” Think of the kindness D— tries to offer you. C——, too. I am lonely. That is why I keep gravitating back to the Flying Scotsman like a moth to a flame, to the girls I know so well & the drink I know better. “Mariani brings alive the doubts and self-recriminations that constantly bedeviled Crane and the accusatorial inner voices that must have haunted him during his frequent hangovers. Alcohol and depression exacted a truly terrible physical and emotional toll on Crane, and his hair turned from premature gray to white by the age of 28. He was frequently jailed or beaten for his drinking, and Mariani’s index lists 17 instances of Crane’s “outrageous and violent behavior” due to alcohol. He embarrassed himself, alienated friends and damaged his ability to concentrate on his writing, but Mariani notes, “Like [Charlie] Chaplin, he meant to pick himself up, brush himself off, and go on whistling into the teeth of fate.”” 

“Like Hopkins, Crane sought an epiphanic vision, and Mariani notes, “In spite of the absence of any God he can name, there is a desperate vulnerability about Crane’s prayer for meaning” in poems such as “O Carib Isle!”….Crane once signed a postcard to his mother with the name “Atlantis.” As Mariani notes, “Even to himself he seemed a lost city.”….Mariani leaves us with the tragic image of a brilliant mind struggling with the desire to push the borders of poetry beyond the familiar and traditional to “new thresholds, new anatomies,” all the while contending with interior realities that were the source of both his greatest inspiration and his greatest unhappiness. Although Crane sank beyond the reach of lifesavers, thanks to Mariani’s book we retain a strong sense of the spiritual gates this poet sought to enter.” Very much on Saturday night I was thinking how fake all the smiles & friendship from the girls is, as they only smile & pretend to like you for the money. There are some exceptions to this, I think. D— is not nice to me just to get pounds from me, nor is C——. Maybe M——, too, and for a while —–. I could of look back at all the arguments I have been having at the Scotsman with a detached amusement. It is just an adventure I am having.

I really don’t care about looking for jobs now (23rd April 2006)

I really don’t care about looking for jobs now. I will never find a better job than this. All I want now is to lose myself in classical music. Just accept this will take a long while to get over. You are heading for ruin. Concentrate on the positives. Concentrate on writing with blue hands in cold stoveless rooms like Nietzsche, heading to the cold icy air of the mountains, where the air is thinner & there are less people. I always want to get to where there are less people. I seem to have lost interest in art museums, in classical music concerts. I am just lost in an emptiness. All there is is drinking. This coming week I will devote to writing, staying up all night, into the early hours of the morning. Funny how sweet & lovely to me the new brown top barmaid was; she was gorgeous to me. Jane was lovely to me. Even though my life is getting better year on year, there is always a period each year when I go into real psychological darkness & desperate straits. 

“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”. 

“Crane tends to be labelled as American poetry’s answer to both Rimbaud and Keats. Like the young Rimbaud he believed a poet’s vision derived from systematic deregulation of the senses; many of his poems were written in an alcohol-induced frenzy while listening to the same song on his Victrola over and over again, while his tireless, often dangerous cruising of the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Hoboken waterfronts – occasionally under the pseudonym Mike Drayton, in honour of the Elizabethan poet – shocked more conservative friends such as Allen Tate and Yvor Winters……..By the time he arrived in Mexico in 1931 he was grey-haired, puffy-featured, and subject to hallucinations, delirium tremens, and corrosive self-disgust. He wrote only one poem there, the sublime “The Broken Tower”, in which he acknowledged his inability to do more than merely “trace the visionary company of love”, or hold for longer than “an instant in the wind / each desperate choice”. A month after completing it in late March of 1932, Crane decided he had no choices left at all.”

Solitary & private even in the midst of the crowds (16th April 2006)

Solitary & private, even in the midst of the crowds. I feel such pain, and lead such a double life. Women are drawn to me, but then can find nothing behind the withdrawnness & the reticence, but a black vacuum which they run away from. Still, they remain fascinated, and usually are drawn back again. This is Chelsea v Vicenza day when I actually came in my pants while watching that huge-breasted blonde girl in the red wig at Sunset Strip. It is also The Damnation of Faust day. I am relying on the Flying Scotsman more than ever as my life support because I cannot travel anymore. I am missing the highs of Berlin & Vienna & Brussels, and am stuck in London. I have to keep going to the Scotsman to fill that gap. 

“Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then there’s an artist who does and who makes something new and actually thickens the texture of life. But it’s very rare…You have to be able to be really free to find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious constraints. After all, life is nothing but a series of sensations, so one may as well try and make oneself extraordinary, extraordinary and brilliant, even if it means becoming a brilliant fool like me and having the kind of disastrous life that I have had. That is it.” Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma, Michael Peppiatt, 1996. 

“It’s only by going too far that you can hope to break the mould and do something new. Art is a question of going too far. Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before. The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you’ve got it’s looking real.” Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1987, Thames & Hudson. 

”Actually, I’m the most ordinary person possible. It’s just that I like throwing myself in the gutter. Every artist wants to throw himself into the gutter. It’s part of his life, it’s a necessity. You might say that I lead a gilded gutter life, I drift from bar to bar, from gambling place to gambling place, and when I don’t do those things, I go home and paint some pictures. I am completely amoral. If I hadn’t painted I would have been a criminal….I have always known life was absurd. Life is nothing but a series of sensations…….Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary…I think of life as meaningless and yet it excites me. I always think that something marvellous is about to happen. How can I trap this transient thing? ” …Francis Bacon in conversations.

Whenever I feel depressed my old sexual demon returns and that banishes my despair in mad displays of wild exhibitionism (15th April 2006)

Whenever I feel depressed, my old sexual demon returns, and that banishes my despair in mad displays of wild exhibitionism. It is the Weimar Berlin spirit. It is Josephine Baker on the stage in nothing but a girdle of bananas. It is Anita Berber the sex dancer losing herself in opium and gin. It is George Grosz and Otto Dix. I progressed from The Flying Scotsman to harder stuff and then back to The Flying Scotsman again. I am pushing the boundaries of what The Flying Scotsman can offer however. How much I would like to fuck J----. How much I would like to fuck K----. How much I would like to fuck L---. I like to be on the edge. I like my CALCULATED madness with -----, just pushing things as far as I wanted them to go---and then pulling back. So I had an effect on people & stirred things up. I like pushing things CALCULATEDLY with A---. I would like to see Clarisse in Brussels again. Tuesday is the anniversary of Lulu at the ENO and VIENNESE EROTICISM. Immerse myself in Berg, Webern and Schoenberg, the most sensually decadent music ever written. And, immersed in it, soaked in it like whisky, go back to The Flying Scotsman!

All I care about is my magazine, my Fackel. I have nothing else. I am a broken down man living in the ruins. ----- thought she wanted to get involved then changed her mind. What is important is to give style to one's character, and to turn one's mistakes into something that had to happen for the overall good, and one must not be without. The world's so quiet & silent at night.

Well where do I go from here? (10th April 2006)

Well, where do I go from here? It has been a very stressful few months. THE ONLY WAY TO BEHAVE WHEN ATTACKED IS WITH MORE DEFIANCE! LIVE MORE WILDLY! DO WORSE! PROVOKE & PROVOKE THEM EVEN MORE! FLAUNT YOURSELF IN THEIR FACES! I AM FRANCIS BACON! I AM WEDEKIND! I AM KASPAR HAUSER! I AM AUTISMUS. I AM LOTTA. I AM THE COLD ICY AIR OF THE MOUNTAINS. I AM WALKING THROUGH THE ISHTAR GATE. I AM SEEING ELENA PROKINA IN EUGENE ONEGIN. I AM SEEING VIKTOR MULLER’S SALOME. I AM SEEING ADOLPH MENZEL’S BAROQUE ALTARS. Everyone is so contemptuous and scornful of me at the moment. So what? I am autistic. I am strange & eccentric. I am silent & withdrawn. “Solitary and private, in spite of the crowd around them, Roosters enjoy their dreams.”