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.”

Finally roused myself from bed to record 11.04am Vaughan Williams: Sinfonia antarctica (1st September 2006)

Finally roused myself from bed to record 11.04am Vaughan Williams: Sinfonia antarctica.
11.48am Scriabin: Sonata No 9, Op 68 “Black Mass”. Let this be like the months preparing for the Swedish visit, after the Sleeping Beauty is a Junkie newspaper article. Berlin Phil at the Proms tonight.
All that matters is the books. Autismus. Black Narcissus. The Cold Icy Air of the Mountains. Casanova.
Do I really want to go to Vienna and Berlin so much? Wasn’t the Midnight Bell better? Those heady nights watching Florence Crazy, Hips Don’t Lie, Check On It, Martini, Janet Material Girl, Amanda, Sylvia Dip It Low, Vicki, Anya, Lucky. Bodyrockers I like the way you move. Kelly. Thais Lola. Carla. Sunny No One Knows. The Bell is so far and away the best of the strip pubs in London. Yes, I lost myself there, but isn’t losing yourself exciting. I want Berlin and Vienna for really exotic, dirty sex. Wait for the really dark, black, rainy nights before going out. I am completely carefree because I am a writer. I am Ernest Dowson and that is all that is important. I am Frank Wedekind. I am Karl Kraus. “A terrorist launched a series of bomb attacks against chamber music venues around London.” “Amidst the destruction and bloodshed, the piano player and the violinist played on, refusing to let the terrorists win”.
“Curling tendrils of black ink like blood, growing like flowers around the doorways and streets and buses. Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy started up from somewhere amidst the towering foliage. Somewhere, at the Midnight Bell, Florence started to dance.”
Yes I question if I want to go to Vienna wasting all that money after working so hard to save it, but that is to forget the excitement, the nervousness so intense I cannot breathe as my train pulls into Vienna.

After Lamm's what else is there to do for me in Munich apart from struggling to the New Pin & trying to make it back to the Intercity before I explode? (4th August 2006)

After Lamm's what else is there to do for me in Munich, apart from struggling to the New Pin & trying to make it back to the Intercity before I explode? Nothing. Really. Lamm's is the be all and end all of my every day in Munich. At nights, the White Coffin becomes the be all and end all but I think even that has finished for me now, as it has become just full of memories which the here and now increasingly struggles to live up to. The more fantastic memories you have built up in a place, or exquisitely painful ones, the more blood you have left on the tracks, the harder it is to get the same thrill out of the place & the more disappointing it becomes. It becomes a law of diminishing returns. There is a rising arc of your first few visits when it gets better & better, then you reach the zenith, then level off, then the arc inexorably descends, and every trip becomes increasingly distressingly flat and uneventful. The whores get more flat-chested and unattractive every time you go. In Berlin, Yulia, Riccarda, Iga, Diana, gone forever. Maybe they were always poor but the excitement of going somewhere new made them seem more sexy and alluring than they really were. The more you return the more you tend to see the same women in the cold light of day, as it were, and you realise they weren’t all they were cracked up to be. 

I want to write books the like of which have never been seen before. Journals of a man subsumed in a life of emptiness and nothingness, but who revels in and gorges himself on this emptiness and nothingness, like a mother eating her own placenta. Journals about the visceral pleasure in detachment of an autistic person. About transcendency, about finding lenses that enable one to focus all the rays of this emptiness and nothingness like a magnifying glass used to focus the rays of the sun to start a fire, like the mirror that Orphee steps through to enter the Underworld, and then the transcendency flares into life like a white phosphorescent explosion, and one orgies in the transcendency, in the sublime orgasmic detachment from everything and everyone around you, in the supreme quality of emptiness and nothingness stretched to the nth degree like a taut violin string that is at any moment about to break but never quite goes; what exquisite pleasure is then to be found. If Guy Debord’s view of life was to seek the perfect point of inebriation, mine is to locate the perfect point of transcendental orgasmic detachment. The nights I would go to the Coliseum and have to creep in the darkness to the gentleman’s toilets and furiously masturbate so aroused was I. The nights at the opera in Berlin, when I had to leave at the interval in search of Kant and cunt, so highly-strung and aroused had I become. 

It is possible to take an aesthetic appreciation in fine pornography, fine aids to arousal and ejaculation; indeed it is impossible not to. The night in Munich I had to leave Strauss’s Arabella in desperate race back to Schiller and Goethe. It was Karl Kraus who said a woman can sometimes be an acceptable substitute for masturbation, but that it requires an awful lot of imagination. When I think of all the brief connections I have made this year with women, Florence, Melani, Amanda, Pamela, Olga, I can say that not one of them gave me an iota of the pleasure that I felt when the woman in the cinema let the men crowd around her with their cocks out, and let me wrap her hair around my cock to masturbate with in the dark. Transgression is not only possible, but beautiful. I would go further. Transgression is not only beautiful, it is essential. The double life is absolutely essential in order to save one’s life. 

Oh I cannot wait to get back to Nuremberg again! To go back to the Pils Bar to look for Martina! To go back to the Caribic on a Saturday night! My trips always used to be a three-way battle between Love, Art and Eros, this in the days when I was tormented by my desires and my repression, and the more I repressed my desires the more they overwhelmed me. Truly the only way to avoid tempation is to give in to it. Only by indulging your tormenting desire does that desire go away and leave you free to go on with more constructive things, like writing about it. In the last two or three years, however, I have achieved a unity of the three. Love, Art and Eros have been forged together so everything I do is motivated and fuelled by the combination of the three. I go to the Wiertz Museum during the day, and walk around that extraordinary single big room–alone, always alone–and already achieve a fine erection. My cock strains hugely in my trousers and rolls from side to side like a ship in a storm as I walk slowly around the room. By the time I penetrate into the three smaller rooms at the end of the corridor, it is all I can do not to remove my swollen member from its captivity and frig myself maniacally there & then on the spot. How Wiertz’s Napoleon arouses me, his Satan. Because I remember every time I have been here before, it was a precursor to the exquisite coils of desire I would envelop myself in later that night, so the Wiertz Musuem serves as the appetiser, the foreplay, the anteroom on the first floor, as it were, to the brothel on the second. 

Similarly, I go to the Museum of Modern Art in order to arouse myself by looking again at the deliciously dirty Paul Delvaux pictures, the Profond des Plaisirs, Salvador Dali’s Temptation of St Anthony, Tresors de Satan, and Alfred Brooks’s Salome, knowing what it will lead to later. How can I not walk around art galleries with an erection! Especially if there is some sexy woman walking around the galleries just ahead of you, so you sometimes pass her and she sometimes passes you, in an erotic dance, a waltz, where you both know less than half your mind is on the pictures, and your eyes are surreptitiously looking at each other much more than at the paintings on the wall! Oh art galleries are the most erotic places on Earth! Classical music concerts, too. I have never met so many single women as I did when I used to go to concerts every week. The red scallop neck top girl who followed me back into the auditorium at the Barbican after the interval, and who as I looked up from my notebook, I made suddenly electric eye contact with. For the entire second half of the concert, as she sat two rows in front of me, her chest rose and fell like she had been running, so excited and aroused had she become about what might happen between us afterwards. Of course, nothing did. I sidled miserably home on my own, hating myself more with every step I took, but still–the mutual arousal and anticipation had been thrilling. So many times I have had encounters like this at classical music concerts. The Irish-looking lush in front of me in the Wigmore Hall ticket queue, who kept looking back at me, and then for no discernible reason bent right over, so I could see up her skirt. Women can be quite primitive in their seduction techniques sometimes. And people say to me “How boring! Art galleries! Classical music concerts!” They have no idea. The highly developed dirty mind, the truly smutty intellect, can find sex in a pot plant. And don’t get me started on tropical palmhouses and butterfly houses! Steamy indeed! Steamy in every sense of the word! I want to write smutty monographs of no more than 45 or 50 pages each, to document how deliciously dirty the world is.

I am unique. It is important to remember that (3rd August 2006)

I am unique. It is important to remember that. I am writer and eccentric, like Philip O’Connor, Friedrich Nietzsche in cold stoveless rooms, Ernest Dowson. I exist to write those extreme, bizarre, small little books, like Autismus, Black Narcissus, The Cold Icy Air of the Mountains, and Casanova. 45 page long monographs about emptiness and nothingness. Smile from Calcutta blonde: “No ice today!” I need to focus on Miami Vice, Rebels & Martyrs exhibition, classical music concerts. The sexiest encounters of my life were at the Barbican and Wigmore Hall. 

I travel uniquely, to Berlin, Vienna and Brussels. I live a bizarre and nocturnal life. I will continue to use Sunset Cinema and Demi and Pamela. There is nothing like that excitement when a man comes in with a woman and everyone crowds around with their cocks out. Day 1 of my new life starts here. No more Midnight Bell. The Calcutta only, followed by Sunset Cinema, Demi and Pamela. I will go to the Cotton Club only when Deborah is on. I am Ernest Dowson. Philip O’Connor. The Shining Roads will be exclusively in Soho. How thrilling it is to come out of the cinema with my huge cock rolling in my trousers, just around the corner to Demi or Pamela. Just getting the bus up Regent Street and along Oxford Street you see so many big breast women, making me ready for cinema even today. My life revolves around drinking & pornography. I want to take a long train journey again, thinking and writing.

I went in Dionysus again on Wednesday. Absolutely lovely. How lovely it was to be in Charing Cross Station today. I really love Charing Cross. The way in Berlin I cling like a limpet to Berlin Zoo station, and in Munich I stay in the Intercity connected to the Hauptbahnhof, and in Vienna I stay in the Dorint opposite the Westbahnhof, and in Brussels I stay in the Ibis opposite the Gare du Midi, in London my whole life revolves around Charing Cross. I love the Upper Crust girls who get my tuna & mayo rolls ready for me, the Calcutta pub who get my cokes and beers ready for me. 

I took an incredible risk watching those porn movies in the hotel business centre the Christmas before last, before w—ing in room 16. I have never been able to work out what that fantastic film was. I am sure it was a Christoph Clark but I have never tracked it down. Like that elusive E.E. Doc Smith Lensman book I read where the captain slides his hard hand down over F’s breasts while they are watching a play together on board the spaceship. Before C goes to his room and disrobes. The best w—ing of my life was the first nights I stayed in the Dorint Hotel in Vienna while I was en route to Oslo on my Munch pilgrimage,when I was in the blackest frame of mind of my life. The two things do go together. My greatest periods of unrestrained sexuality come at my times of greatest blackness & despair. I need to be low and black and destroyed. I feel like Munch in Christiana now. Too much drink and drugs and endless nights with scantily clad women have overwhelmed my senses and driven me into a spiral of despair. 

The sexiest encounters of my life were with girls at classical music concerts, while I was sitting in the back row–the red scallop neck girl at the Barbican, little brown bob who sat opposite me in the Barbican lobby, black fur coat at the Wigmore, the grey skirt lush in the Wigmore lobby. The erections I have got in art galleries! Especially the Brussels Museum of Modern Art and the Wiertz Museum–I have got to go back to Brussels this autumn! To the Modern Art, the Wiertz, the Cathedral, the Gare du Midi Pullman bar, it is such a morbidly erotic place, even before I get up to Empire and the Gare du Nord. I got great erections in Antwerp,too. And Munich Neue Pinakothek. Oh how erotic it is to be there during the day, going to the New Pin and Lamms, knowing it is just preparation for what I am going to do later–cross Bayerstrasse and round the corner of Schillerstrasse and disappear into the White Coffin. 

My heroes are Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx. I live everyday of my life now as if I am on holiday, just drinking and eating and w—ing. The gorgeous beer in the Calcutta, the gorgeous fish & chips in Dionysus, the gorgeous KFC in Leicester Square. The gorgeous tuna & mayo rolls in Charing Cross Station. When in Berlin I live for the knesepfannes in my hotel bar and the ham & eggs rolls in Thobens at Berlin Zoo station. In Vienna it is the alt wiener rostbratens in my hotel bar; I no longer go to Wegenstein's after the staff attacked me. I went back once but it is always so empty there, in contrast to the warmth & conviviality of Lamm's in Munich. I think I almost go to Munich solely so I can eat in Lamm's & have a glass of their ice cold Augustiner beer. I go to Berlin solely so I can eat the knesepfannes in my hotel & the Zoo Thobens rolls. 

Oh I so much want to go back to Munich! But where to stay–the Regent which I love for its bar, or the Intercity for its ease? I go to Vienna solely for the cold Zipfers served by the white shirted girls in the Dorint bar before I commence my afternoon of sightseeing, which usually means St Stephen's Cathedral, the Pummerin bell made out of Turkish cannons left behind after the Siege of Vienna, the Butterfly House, the KHM, the Belvedere and the Leopold. Always the same places. Sometimes I will mix in a few Third Man sites, like the Am Hof, and the steps where Harry Lime stood when the cat gave him away and we see him for the first time. I will not go into the sewers again.

Listening to all this Viennese music—Webern 5 Orchestral Pieces, Joseph Korngold lush late romanticism—makes me think of Vienna (27th July 2006)

Listening to all this Viennese music—Webern 5 Orchestral Pieces, Joseph Korngold lush late romanticism—makes me think of Vienna. Even though I wrote her name small, Maria is surely the most beautiful girl I have ever f—-d. Surely the sexiest. Now I look at all my pictures and think they are in a Vienna hotel room with Vienna just outside. Viennese Eroticism, there is nothing quite like it. Bad Timing. The Night Porter. There’s not many Brazilians in Europe, all Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Ukrainians. A couple of stand out Brazilians in Munich in Patricia and Bella Rosa, it is true. In London it is nearly ALL Brazilians! I should stay in the Radisson SAS in Vienna, if only for the first night.
We are approaching the Lost in Space boundary.
You Don’t Know Me.
********
I am a writer. I am Francis Bacon. I am eccentric and wild.
All that matters is the books, the long journeys across Europe. Writing alone with blue hands in cold stoveless rooms.