YOU CAN BE STRANGE AS YOU WANT AT THE FLYING SCOTSMAN! (13th March 2006)

YOU CAN BE STRANGE AS YOU WANT AT THE FLYING SCOTSMAN! BE STRANGE & ECCENTRIC, NOT DOWN & DEPRESSED! IF YOU ARE POSITIVE, & RADIATE HAPPINESS, PEOPLE WILL BE DRAWN TO YOU. I WILL LOSE MYSELF IN NIHILISM & SELF-DESTRUCTION TO PUNISH MYSELF FOR LOSING ——, LIKE BERLIN IN THE 1920S.

I rounded off my year in style by getting thrown out of the Hogarthian place for my appalling behaviour (31st Dec 2006)

I rounded off my year in style by getting thrown out of the Hogarthian place for my appalling behaviour. In five years I don’t think I have ever seen anyone thrown out, unless they were actually cracking bar stools over other people’s heads. How low can a boy sink? I think it was watching the Consul in Under the Volcano the previous night that inspired me to these dizzying depths of depravity. I was already worse for wear when I arrived, had one more, discovered Lucky now has dark hair, Crystal discovered I now have dimples, headed off to see La Antonacci. I had a standing place, but found I kept nodding off, and coming round just as my knees were about to buckle. I left after an hour, not even making it to the interval. As Carmen made her escape from jail, the lights momentarily dimmed, and I made my escape from the opera house, running in the direction of rain-soaked Kingsway where I made my fateful decision to get the 91 BACK to King’s Cross. Things then went from bad to worse. Israeli Helen, —–, Stella, Chloe, Arleni, Sindy, Demi. I seem to remember buying Demi a box of chocolates as she told me it was her last night [it later turned out it wasn't].

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.