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. 

 

"You may think the Grand Tour is about politics, and culture and art---and you would be quite right. But it is also about gambling, drinking and sex. Particularly sex"

"You may think the Grand Tour is about politics, and culture, and art---and you would be quite right. But it is also about gambling, drinking, and sex. Particularly sex. Young grand tourists came across it everywhere, lively, in prostitutes, and given some sort of authority by the works of art at which they looked." That is exactly the effect of Makart's Summerhouse in Berlin, or his Four Senses in Vienna, or of the Wiertz Museum and the Delvauxs and the Last Temptation of St Antony and the Tresors de Satan in Brussels. It gives 'authority' to my search for sexual pleasure at night. 

"Unlike Rome, Naples was ruled by a royal court. And where there was a king there too was opera. In innumerable letters, journals, and diaries, opera is mentoned far more often and far more specifically than art or architecture. It was, apart from sex, their most fervent passion. They adored it. Some rode halfway across the country to hear a soprano of new reputation. And in Naples opera was said to be the glory of the country. Young grand tourists fell in love with these people...with their voices rather than their bodies." How else to describe my repeated visits to Berlin, for Die Ferne Klang, Salome, La Traviata? For one night only to see Elena Prokina? Maria Grazia Schiavo 

"To Vesuvius the grand tourists were drawn like bees to honey." 

"When they went back to England, they knew how to gamble, they knew how to drink, they knew how to fuck." 

I gamble with my life. Every time you go out at night looking for someone, you are gambling. Like on a roulette wheel, you put your money down on a number black or red, & spin the wheel. Most times you will lose, but once in a while you will win, and the win makes all the losses worthwhile. All the innumerable small losses are more than made up for by the occasional spectacular win, and that is what you keep doing it for. It is to be learned--this cleaving and this burning, but only by the one who spends out himself again. Oh 

I so much want to resume my Grand Tour: to go back to Brussels now, for the Radisson SAS, for La Monnaie, for the Empire and the Gare du Nord. I so much want to go back to Berlin for the Berlin Plaza, for the Staatsoper, for the Oscar Wilde, for Ciro, Mon Cheri, Golden Gate & Monte Carlo. I so much want to go back to Vienna for the Dorint, the Belvedere, the KHM, the Butterfly House, and the Gurtel. And the videokabins! The videokabins are the glory of Europe. 

THE ONLY WAY I CAN GO TO EUROPE AGAIN IS IF I HAVE GOT PLENTY OF MONEY IN MY WOOLWICH ACCOUNT. ONLY BY NOT GOING TO THE FLYING SCOTSMAN WILL MY BUILDING SOCIETY ACCOUNT START TO RECOVER TO GIVE ME SOME SPENDING MONEY. 

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. Four in the Calcutta. Managed to keep the box seat the whole time. Two more stunning big breast girls on the 87 to Vauxhall, black ponytail black glasses black T-shirt, and white blond, black shades, orange top over purple bra. 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 Cotton Club and 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 travel to wallow in nostalgia, not see new places. But just going to Brussels would seem such a dead end, wouldn’t it? Brussels should never be a terminus, it can only be a starting point. A jumping off point. Better to wait till the New Year and combine it with the Berlin trip. One hot steamy, rainy, Phnom Penh weekend I could just pop over to Brussels couldn't I, just for a Thursday Friday Saturday night, back home Sunday morning, back to work Sunday night? Just for a couple of days drinking in the Maes Bar, couple of nights at Empire and Gare du Nord? What is the difference from a couple of days drinking in the Calcutta, couple of nights at the Bell and Soho? 

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 Cotton Club 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.

The richer you are the more you can gamble and the more you gamble the more you are going to enjoy spectacular wins (12th August 2006)

The richer you are the more you can gamble, and the more you gamble the more you are going to enjoy spectacular wins. If you are poor you can only gamble very rarely and very small sums and so even if you do sometimes win it is only for very small rewards. How can I say Munich is boring? How can I say Vienna is boring? You carry the weather with you. If I travelled with £2,000 in my pocket I would have the time of my life there. If I went in with a million pounds I could fuck the Irina lookalike, fuck Maria, fuck Angelique, and have the time of my life. Even in Munich I could go from club to club having a drink with every girl I liked until I found the one with looser morals who would let me come on her breasts at least. But as it is now I cannot afford to look in so many clubs, I cannot afford to buy so many girls a drink in order to find the one I will, and I come away feeling frustrated & that Munich is over, when really it is only that I do not have the starting collateral to enable me to gamble freely. You have to speculate to accumulate. At the moment I cannot speculate. To do is to dare. At the moment, I can no longer dare. This is a very important thing I have realised. Munich can come back to life for me ! Brussels can come back to life for me! Vienna can come back to life for me! All these places can bloom and blossom and shoot up above me letting me shelter under their glorious smutty fronds–if I repair my finances and hoard my gold coins in London so I can gamble wildly and speculate crazily and dare everything when I go back. 

In Feb and March I spent £617 on strippers and £547 on drink, another £1,164 in Feb and March alone. So together Feb March April May June July I could have had an extra £2,700 in my Woolwich account, or £1,100 in my Woolwich account and my Barclaycard at zero! Then for sure Munich would be full of life for me and bloom and blossom. Then for sure Vienna would be full of life for me, and bloom and blossom. You should only go into those Munich clubs, Vienna clubs, Berlin bars, if you have a lot of cash to spend; there is absolutely no point if you are on a tight budget. Then no wonder you come home feeling frustrated and dis-spirited. My holidays have got increasingly worse as my debt has increased. Let me go back to those years of repression 1996 1997 1998 when I could only yearn for those occasional visits to the pornographic cinema and a whore. That repression was so sexy, I was like a tautly strung hair trigger, it was delicious. Since then, in contrast, I have been like a gambling addict, Merson or Rooney, going deeper and deeper into debt. That is over now. The girls always say in those places I look miserable. If I went in rich I would be happy & fuck them all.

Go into Brussels like pulling into a great palmhouse, gigantic tropical ferns and trees and butterflies all around me. A steaming primordial paradise. With soot on the leaves. Let it become an overheated closed hothouse. Go into Munich the same way. Go into Vienna the same way. The more poor I became the more I travelled miserably, to Empire, Atlantic City, Pour Platin, Golden Gate. When you are happy people are attracted to you like to a magnet & you have great times. As I get poorer, I become more miserable & only have bad times. How happy I will feel when I reduce my Barclaycard to zero! The long project starts here.

OK so it has taken 8 months for me to get my position this bad. It follows it will take another 8 months to get it back even to where it was before, owing £3,900. How fantastic to see that Paul Delvaux Pygmalion picture again! De Chirico’s Melancholy of the Beautiful Day! Now let me spend all these long hours in my flat, my little nest, my eagle’s eyrie, going through all my old notebooks, manuscripts, book margins, typing up everything from my previous holidays that can be of use in my journals. Finally going through all those newspapers. Oh what joy this next few days off is going to be! I will live on cokes & hamburgers from McDonald’s next door. At night I will treat myself to a couple of pints in the Calcutta. Maybe once a week treat myself to Dionysus and the Cotton Club Cinema and Demi or Pamela. I must get to the Rebels & Martyrs exhibition next week. Of course I cannot give up my nest. What a crying tragedy that will be. That is the best thing in my life. That is the nuclear option. If I spent £800 on beer & strippers in the last two months I should therefore be able to pay off £800 on my Barclaycard over the next two months? This is where I turn my life around, and the fightback starts. I ache to see that Paul Delvaux picture for real in the Brussels Museum of Modern Art! How I ache to see Dali’s The Temptation of St Anthony in the flesh again! “Today, visitors to the Wiertz Museum enter into a highly preserved atmosphere from a revolutionary era favourable for contemplation, inner reflection or daydreams… ” How fantastic to see La Belle Rosine again! Le Tresors de Satan! La Figure Tombale! How much I want to get back to Brussels! I will have to go on a pilgrimage to Felicien Rops in Namur, I think. 

How I ache to see the huge Fountain of Inspiration in Brussels again, and the Mars & Venus on the opposite wall. So full of personal meaning, more than ever now. Getting back to Brussels will be such a symbol of my rebirth. It will be very emotional, before then pushing on to my reunion with Berlin Plaza and Berlin Zoo. Brussels can never be enough on its own. Brussels is always the stopping off point, the starting point, the staging post. I could even go to Berlin for a one night stand in January to see La Traviata?

Oh how lovely to get back to my lovely little flat in the morning! How much I love it. Take that first paragraph above and turn it into a 3rd person story, say the opening chapter of The Willing Cheeks of Fu Manchu. Pulling into Antwerp station covered in trees and rainforest and diamonds everywhere. The well is not empty in Munich. The well is not empty in Vienna. You carry the water with you.

What I wrote 8th September last year? “I would not want to stay living in this house. No point having a place of my own if it is so far from London. I would want a one bedroom flat, lined with my books from floor to ceiling! Tropical ferns all over the floor. Classical music playing. My manuscripts in a drawer. It would have to be more central on a tube line. The only advantage to living in —— now is my mother.” How poignant it is to hear Kings of Leon Red Morning Light and Strokes 12:51 again! Of course I will travel again this year, and of course I will go first to Brussels. I always start in Brussels. I want to spend long long nights lying in the dark of my flat on the floor listening to my Viennese Eroticism classical music tapes or my old Abba tapes. What joy this is going to be for the next 8 weeks. I HAVE been spending almost exactly £100 a week on drink & strippers/whores for as long as I can remember, so it is not unreasonable to guess I could save £80 a week by only going to the Calcutta occasionally, and if we have ten weeks to go until end of October, surely I can save £800?

So my last night is here, and already I am looking forward to getting the bus back to Calcutta tomorrow & then up to Dionysus, then Cotton Club Cinema, then Demi or Pamela. Do the old thing: wait for the black, rainy days & then go out then! If it is horrible and hot, then stay in. How much happier I feel when I can wear my jumper. My spirits and my confidence are lifted by about an extra 40% if I can wear my jumper. That fat, voluptuous, beautiful brunette was at the 74 stop again this morning, in two tone brown top & long skirt, talking on phone as she paced up & down in front of me, her massive breasts like two conical torpedoes in that cantilevered bra. Yesterday was even better, sitting there already as I arrived, in yellow, so low cut top I could see unbelievably massive amounts of her cleavage. Wouldn’t that be great, to bring all my books here, so they stacked up against the walls up to the ceiling?! All my Nietzsche, my Freud, my Marx, my Michael Moorcock? I will take one trip to Brussels and Berlin, then a second trip to Brussels and Munich & Vienna. Always by Eurostar & train. I love trains so much. The great thing about that is I don’t have to go on to Berlin if I don’t want to. I can stay in Brussels then go home if I want. If I meet someone like Clarisse in Brussels I can stay there much longer. If Munich is banging I can stay in Munich for six days, and forget Vienna. Or if Munich is dead, I can go straight on to Vienna the next day.

I always say the great thing about Interrail passes is you can go where you feel like when you feel like it, but you can do that just with point to point tickets as well! If I get to Brussels and meet someone, I can stay & forget about Berlin. If I get to Munich and meet someone I can forget about going to Vienna. Or I just might feel like I really want to go to Nuremberg instead. But definitely I would rather go everywhere by train now–as long as I get 8-10 days from work at a time! I always want to start off with Eurostar to Brussels, before travelling on to Berlin, or travelling on to Munich or Vienna. Not only is it hot and sunny, the second 87 bus stop under the railway bridge had a closed sign on it as well! Even though the bus did actually let us on. Another reason to stay in for a couple of days? It has finally happened with Alia, she did not smile hardly at all this time. As she saw me come, she almost looked contemptuous, “Oh not you again–why don’t you just fuck off?” It will happen with the black McDonald’s girl in the mornings soon. You carry the magic with you. If I stepped into Atlantic City feeling magical again, it will be magical in there. Like the Junior Senior-J Lo-Hip Teens Don’t Wear Blue Jeans nights, the Jay-Z Threat nights, the Global DJs San Francisco nights.

That pretty blonde girl on the bus back from Vauxhall again. I felt a tension between us all the way. After the driver let her off just before Union Road, she walked along a way, before suddenly darting a look back to see if I had got off behind her. Then as bus finally passed the shops, she was coming away from the paper shop, and darted another look at the bus. I think she has feeling for me. We had the Carnival year, the Astral Years, the C– Years, Black Narcissus Year, the Hotel Years, the Flying Scotsman Years, now I feel we are stepping through a portal, a lens, a wormhole, an Ishtar Gate, into a whole new kind of life. A life revolving around travel again, but deeper travel than before. Still, I was only skimming the surface before.

Standing at Vauxhall bus station waiting for the 87 to take me on to Charing Cross, I felt so much that I was standing at the tram stop by Vienna Westbahnhof. It was an intense moment of erotic displacement. And then as I crossed the concourse of Charing Cross Station I felt so much I was crossing the concourse of the Westbahnhof. And then in the Calcutta Avril Lavigne’s Complicated came on! As I started my 3rd pint, I got the overwhelming feeling I was drinking in the bar of the Dorint, with Natalia serving me. And then standing at the 87 stop home looking up at the modernist Charing Cross architecture thinking it was Vienna. Quite extraordinary. This is what I go out for. There were so many women alone in the Calcutta at this time, I shall have to come at 8-9pm more often. So £13.75 spent. There was the most amazing feeling that everything was now different. Everything has changed. I have gone through the eye of the needle, and I am in a new universe. Yunis was gorgeous in the Calcutta. Everything has changed. Everything is new. Everything is now possible and everything is once more in play. Vienna and Munich have most definitely come back into play. So much so that flying to Vienna for FIVE days was the most exciting thought in my mind. And of course fucking Angelique, Maria and Irina double.

I want to go to Vienna & Berlin with such a big pot of money. Oh I cannot wait till I get to those Brussels windows, and it is just 2½ hours away.

Christ, I must confess I’d love to see Deborah tonight, dancing to that Calling track, She’s all that he wants, she’s all that he needs. Remember how Carol came up to me & kissed me on the cheek for no apparent reason? How Melani looked at me in the dark? Then the next week turned to me in the bar and said “How are you?” “I LOVE opera!” The events at Heathrow yesterday make me more than ever want to go everywhere by train. I went back to the Calcutta last night & it did not feel like Westbahnhof at all! Because I was still hung over and tired from the night before. I slept on & off right through to 5PM in the afternoon! All those dreams of a Hogarthian Flying Scotsman I used to have, where it had side rooms with beds where real orgies took place, and Sylvia was always there. It was a bawdy Rabelaisian Rake’s Progress place in those dreams. The great days of the Scotsman ended when Sylvia left. Janet was the only one to come close after that. Czech Republic, Hungary, how I love those Eastern European women. One day a long time from now I will go back. Once again the Calcutta was much more female after 9PM, pretty blonde bob with suitcase sitting at small table by jukebox. Another sexy brunette in white top at tall round table. These late Calcutta nights will definitely become a feature for me now. I would like next week to be a week of movies. Miami Vice, A Scanner Darkly, The Third Man. So after my first week of hoarding, how do I feel? Happy. I have saved £62.26 which means the pot now contains 92.32 Euros. That will be double next week which will mean I have practically paid for three nights in a hotel already or the price of the train ticket. Let us say that I have now covered the Eurostar ticket. I am frightened of conversation. The prospect of conversation literally terrifies me.