Yes I think going to strip pubs is about sex (22nd Dec 2006)

Yes, I think going to strip pubs is about sex. I only enjoy watching a girl strip if I want to f–k her (for those who like dirty talk). There is nothing worse than watching a girl strip who you do not fancy. This is the time to get up & get another drink or go to the lavatory even if you do not really need to go; although, thinking particularly of Sunset, it always looks so rude when a man gets up & leaves his seat as soon as a girl comes on to dance! I try and do it delicately when her back is turned. The dirtiest striptease I ever saw was Hungarian Janet at the *[Hogarthian place]* dancing to Madonna’s Material Girl this year, during her all too brief stay on these shores. I pray for her return in 2007. Nothing else has ever come close to Janet for pure (!) dirty sexiness. It is almost always all in the eyes, I think. You can be watching a dancer and be completely unmoved, but then she looks you in the eye for a couple of seconds, and straightaway you are turned on, as the “smutty provocations” pass between you. But then that is the same anywhere, of course. Tenseness, Eroticism, Repulsive Pathology. 

The plethora of Christmas decorations hanging down from the Queen Anne ceiling made it seem like a tropical whorehouse; oh, I do apologise, HOThouse. Like a mangrove swamp, with the tendrils of fog curling through the door every now & again easily mistaken for steam; if it wasn’t so fucking cold. And it seemed so DARK in there! Obviously the effect of the new lighting. I like dark, so I am all in favour of this. Also, the music seemed louder than I have ever known it. Still not deafening, but louder than usual. In contrast to the Esteemed Maestro I love going to strip pubs at Christmas as they are so packed & the atmosphere is so good, and the Queen Anne was certainly packed. 

And then, there she was, the loveliness that is Ms Adaire. In Santa hat, and little red lacy Santa outfit {Great Tontoolian Marshes! “And those white Martian Princesses have to be seen to be believed!”}. With no disrespect to the other ladies present I enjoyed watching Redd sitting down more than I did watching the others dancing. Why pay to watch? I’d pay to watch her doing nothing. I’d pay to watch her sleep. Still recovering from my Golden Arm excesses of the previous night, and my weakened body already succumbing to a cold, I would not have bothered coming out for anyone but her. I did not stay long & did not indulge in a private dance as the thought of having to sit on my hands when such temptation was right there in front of me was too much to contemplate. I am not that strong.

“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.

If only I could have back all the thousands of pounds I have wasted on strippers and drink over the years I would go out and spend it all on strippers and drink (17th October 2006)

If only I could have back all the thousands of pounds I have wasted on strippers and drink over the years, I would go out and spend it all on strippers and drink. Our sad tawdry addictions are the best of us. If I did not have things to be sadly addicted to, I would kill myself. Our vices are the best of us. They are when we glow brightest and most brilliant. Oscar Wilde would not be celebrated today, would not have the West End full of his plays, would not have his own statute in Adelaide Street and his own stained (of course) window in Westminster Abbey if not for his vice. To watch young women take their knickers off on a stage. What a sad, empty experience, but as sad, empty experiences go, one of the absolute best. And at the Scotsman it has been refined to its most pure and simple state. The Nag’s Head and the Old Axe could be this good, but are not. Dodgy doorman demanding an apparently arbitrary amount of pound coins in their hand before they will let you in, body searches for concealed..what? An endless stream of 20 or 30 girls constantly asking for private dances. The fact that the FS does not offer private dances seems to me one of the most beautiful things about it. Anyway, if any of my Scotsman girls gave me a private dance I think I would die. It would be too much, after all this time longing for them. 

So a Journal about the FS pub, and yet so much of what occurs there must remain unsaid, sub judice. 

People criticise the FS because nothing is spent on it to modernise it, but that seems to me the knub of its absolute charm. It is like stepping back into Victorian London. With the Thatcherite revolution, the Millenium, the old Soho basement strip clubs were replaced by the mirrors and champagne and poles of the Stringfellows, and Sophisticats, and For Your Eyes Only, and we were told it is all right to go to strip clubs now, because they had gone upmarket, and respectable. Since when should sex be respectable? Sex should be down and dirty and sleazy or what is the point of it at all. The FS shines out like a beacon in the Stygian gloom, a glowing candle in the peasouper fog, by having resisted the tide. It is as close as you can get to the old Soho experience. It is like a fly trapped in amber. It is a Lost World at the bottom of a hole on a high South American plateau, where Tyrannosaurus Rex still roams and Pterodactyl still fly in the sky. It is the Pterodactyl brought back to London and escaping and circling above the Geographic Society against a Full Moon. 

KARL KRAUS. “Why do I always act so dumb, seem to fuck things up for fun. Just can’t help behaving, as if my head needs rearranging”. It is always something exotic, and steamy. Exotic, steamy, King’s Cross.

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. 

I got to the Calcutta at 4 Wednesday and I knew it was ominous when I felt how easy the beer was going down (28th Sept 2006)

I got to the Calcutta at 4 Wednesday and I knew it was ominous when I felt how easy the beer was going down. It was one of those rare special days when the beer goes down so easy. Up to the Scotsman after two pints. Didn’t take me long to realise —– was not there as I did not hear her laughter. A new barmaid! Very sexy brunette. A good line up, Lucky, Vicky, Amanda, Helena, Tequila, Nicky, Crystal and Aussie Victoria. —— gave me a nice welcome back, "where you been?" "Where you been?" I said. "In Italy?" "That was fucking July! Where have you been going?" she said. "My mum’s house." She was pulling shocked faces. "My mind is boggling!" After she danced she came & stood in the dark centre corner with me talking. She has got a private party tonight, Tilly's. Next time I will ask her to put me on the list. I got there about ten to six I think, and —— finished at 7. The last two times she collected she leaned right against me until I put the money in. After she left a little brunette girl came in, and mentioned she was a better dancer than them and had better tits. I pulled her back and stopped her from leaving. And after that she was with me for 30? 40? minutes. Me with my hand on her tits and she with her hand down my pants around the base of my cock. Francesca, she is in love with Jasmine. We made a deal, she will help me with —– and I will help her with Jasmine. Helena was grinning at me as she collected. Because of all this, I completely lost count of my number of pints, but it was a lot. And this was even before I started watching the Levski Sofia v Chelsea game on TV! I think I left before half time, and fell asleep on the No.87 home and had to get one back. 

Straight away I am reminded how attractive this world is, and how much I love it.

The Scotsman felt like Streamray now does, completely boring apart from just one girl (2nd August 2006)

The Scotsman felt like Streamray now does, completely boring apart from just one girl. If —– is not there I feel it is completely pointless. Everyone bored me. I have definitely overdone the Scotsman, …..but can I stay away tonight? I went on to Nag’s Head and that was even worse, no one I knew. Awful. Stepped in Sunset Cinema but nothing much on and I was too drunk as well. It was black and rainy, though,and everywhere looked like the Shining Road. I was singing it to myself the whole way back to Charing X. It was beautiful but did not excite me as it used to, when my blood was up. Maybe tonight my blood will be up if I do not drink much, and I will go to cinema & Demi?