A time of illness (4th June 2006)

A time of illness, a time when we feel low, and hit rock bottom, is always good, because we can strip everything away, and just see what is really important to us. What we want to do, what we want to be, cut away all the superfluous things that have been allowed to encrust themselves to us, and concentrate on the simple essentials: classical music, ferns, the books. Then we can start to bounce back, and climb back out of the blackness, feeling stronger, calmer. 

Who is my Helen of Troy now, imprisoned in London? Is it Pamela? Or Melani? Maybe yet Jolanda?

And now the tooth ache returns. So that is two urgent appointments I must now make for next week. Now I am frightened to eat anything as well as wanting to close my eyes all the time.

***

To help deal with the pain I will try to get recordings of Phedre by both Rameau and Britten…and something of Rosa Ponselle. I escape from the misery of my life into opera. From the misery of my eye problems, and my teeth problems. From the misery of the “catastrophes of love”. It is transcendence. It is entering the Kingdom of Death, in love with Princess Mort. It is stepping through the mirror that turns into water, and escaping from the world. I am happiest in the Kingdom of Death, where the skies are always black & there is no sun. The white ruins are lit by a spectral light only. There I can meet the Kaiserin on her marble throne. I can meet Rosa Ponselle and Maria Callas. How can I explain that to people who keep asking if I am “all right”, because I seem “very quiet”? Just all go away and leave me alone, please. It is floating on my back on a lake in a steaming palmhouse, amid the palm fronds and giant lilypads, listening to Herodiade Fragments on the ancient gramophone. Somewhere in the steam my odalisques wander, and stroll, and lounge, and fuck. Suffering makes us soulful, suffering makes us spiritual. We grow lovely out of our longing, wrote Henriette Hardenberg. Longing for freedom makes us beautiful. I lie still and fearless as you enter.

Search for the Ponselle James A Drake biography in Foyles and the Charing Cross Road second hand places.

Remember those incredible dramatic hours spent watching Jolanda dancing to Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand or the Ding-Ding-Dong song?! That is when sex dancing becomes magical, up there with Anita Berber or Mata Hari or Josephine Baker. Pink touched these heights, too, as did Janet [Material Girl! Objection!] at the Scotsman, and Sylvia. Sex dancers who create a real drama, a real sense of menace almost, erotic menace, when they are on the stage. When you suddenly feel you are sheltering from a thunderstorm and lashes of lightning outside and this primal moment watching this woman on this stage is the most important moment of your life, and when it finishes nothing will ever be the same again. My eyes are always going to wear out from time to time as I spend so much of my time, and money, gazing. The sex dancers and whores who have burned themselves onto my retina! The Tallulahs and Esmeraldas who my eyes will never forget.

“He gave up drinking and decided to enjoy women–but from a distance” (18th October 2006)

“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.

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.