I have financial issues (2nd Sept 2006)

I have financial issues. It is like being tied up with ropes. I dream that with one bound I could be free. Like Fantomas. I am tied up with £6000 worth of rope.*********Everything is starting to come good again. The black stormy cool weather has arrived. September has arrived. I have got my bus stop back. I am free of the obsession with Midnight Bell and Cotton Club. Free of the obsession with Lilith. I have saved £400 in four weeks. Reduced my Barclaycard debt from £1600 to £1200 and imminently down to £900. I seem to only be drinking seven beers a week at the moment, instead of fifteen-twenty! Going to Vienna for five days will blow £900 that it has taken four months to save. But “those who run seem to have all the fun”. It is time for another adventure. My life couldn’t go on as it was. It was madness.***********An uneventful journey to work. Three more nights to get through! Then what? Listening to DR Boogie Radio makes me feel like I am on holiday already. Loft Pussycat Lounge. Nik & Jay Boing. Amerie One Thing. Rammstein Keine Lust. I am worried that if I do not do the naughty things I will lose the knack. You get out of the habit. It just shows every time something apparently bad happens, good comes out of it. When Florence destroyed me the other week, it led me into the paradigm shift, and finally saving money, ending my obsession with Midnight Bell and Cotton Club. When I came in & found all the radio stations gone on my work pc, it led to me finding DR Boogie Radio, the best radio station I have ever found. Being given so much more work to do at nights has cured me of the long boredom & made the nights go much faster. Blaze feat Barbara Tucker Most Precious Love

Just in January & February I spent £638 on Tallulah and £500 on drink. Just two months of not going out to Bell & Cotton Club would save me £1100, enough to go on holiday in the New Year. I spent most of my earnings in the Bell and the Cotton Club.

What a fantastic memory when Irina turned to me and said to me “I’m sorry, you’re nice, but you drink too much!” before giving me the most awesome private dance of my life (19th August 2006)

What a fantastic memory when Irina turned to me and said to me “I’m sorry, you’re nice, but you drink too much!” before giving me the most awesome private dance of my life I have ever had or ever will have. It will be awesome to see Melani again, and Jolanda, followed by Deborah? Oh no! What are you saying? Not in August. Strip clubs, Tallulah, that whole world revolts me in August. It was after that private dance with Irina that I got close to Viktoriya, and really nothing has been the same since then.

I no longer have to wait till October 31st as that was predicated on seeing Violeta Urmana in the Mort de Cleopatra in Berlin. I could go mid September! Some people have got a mortgage, some people have got a car–I spend my money on travelling only, which is the greatest thing, and watching showgirls, and fucking the most beautiful whores in the world. I can have three more weeks at work, then go on 5th September. In Vienna, you will not see anything better than Melani, or Jolanda, or Deborah. If I get out of my depth financially after two nights in Brussels, and two nights in Munich, I can always cut and run and come home. There are two good reasons for going in September (1) to see Das Entfuhrung aus dem Serail at La Monnaie Brussels with Alexandra Lubchansky (2) the Maria Callas exhibition at Vienna KHM until 17 Sept. I will stay first night in Brussels SAS for Empire, then go straight to Vienna next day to spend Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, in Vienna Dorint, back to Brussels Ibis early Sunday morning to see Serail Sunday.
“Maria Callas (1923-1977) was one of the great divas of the 20th century. Both her voice and stage presence are legendary. In 1939, the New York-born Greek made her professional debut at the Athens Olympia Theatre and enjoyed her greatest success at La Scala in Milan throughout the 1950s. Until the mid-1960s, she made numerous appearances at the world’s greatest opera houses. She considered her signature role Norma, which she portrayed almost 90 times, somewhat autobiographical. Callas said, “Norma is in many ways like I am. Norma may appear strong, sometimes even brutal, but in reality she is like a lamb that roars like a lion.”
This exhibition focuses on the staging and self-staging of the artist Maria Callas in the operas La Traviata, Tosca, Medea and Norma as well as the film Medea. Splendid costumes, rare pictures, film sequences of Pasolini’s Medea and Franco Zeffirelli’s Tosca as well as numerous audio samples document her unique artistic personality. The exhibition also provides a detailed picture of the star off stage. The opera star was and remains well known far beyond her own artistic oeuvre. Spectacular cancellations of performances, lawsuits, rivalries and her private life caused sensations. Even today, this diva assoluta inspires not only the world of the opera but also literature and fashion.”
(3) MOZART. The Enlightenment: An Experiment @ the Albertina till 20 Sept
In the 1780s Mozart’s genius was unfolding in Vienna. His most intensive creative period – years of overwhelming success and remarkable wealth, but also of financial need, resulting from an inclination towards venturesomeness – took place in the Josephine climate of rapid reform. This open-minded, enlightened society was marked by the ideals of freemasonry.
(4) Round Table. Egon Schiele & His Circle @ the Belvedere till 24 Sept
“In Roeg’s films, characters don’t realise they are in hell because they have been having too much fun for the most part. And by the time they do realise what is happening, they have resigned themselves to the fact that they are past the point of no return.” Romantic Nihilism.
I am going to have an adventure in Vienna without constraint. I will fuck Maria and Harrietta and Irina double.

Who’s the person I miss most in my life? Sylvia–because it was never spoiled and never went wrong. Because we never got involved. I got "involved" (at a very shallow level) with Melani, & Florence, & Jolanda, and so they were all spoiled and went wrong. Sylvia remains a pure and untouched memory of loveliness. I suppose in a way I can say the same for Irina and Susi and Clarisse and Martina. Beautiful women all look the same whereas not so beautiful women all look unique. Sylvia reminds me of so many other women, Charlotte Rampling, Heather Graham, Meg White, Goldfrapp.

I have got £13,500 credit and I owe £5,900. With this Vienna holiday that will increase temporarily, but so what? It is just like taking out a loan. I have taken out a £5,900 loan which I will pay back when I come back from Vienna. And with this loan I am doing amazing, extraordinary things. Burning bright like a firefly. You have to push yourself to the edge. It is only there that you can observe things & record your observations. I am excited about going to work from now, because my journey to Vienna has already started. Remember how I always used to enjoy going to work because it was just getting me through the two or three weeks until I could get back to Munich again, or get back to Berlin again, or get back to Vienna again? Am I really spending hundreds of pounds going all the way to Vienna just to have sex? The sex with the Vienna and Berlin whores is more expensive but it is better. They will do anything. Remember how Yulia, Riccarda, Maria, Diana, did absolutely everything? You do not get that in Soho. Once you have paid your 100 euros you do get an absolutely mind-blowing experience. Now watching the Alizee J’en ai Marre video I know why I travel. If I had never travelled I would never have seen that video. If I had not gone to Berlin and bought the Observer that Sunday in the Cafe Zoo I would never have discovered the Libertines. If I had not gone back to Brussels I would never have discovered Elena Prokina. Travel enriches you so much. Just as the flat costs me a lot of money but it would be a false economy to give it up, so travelling costs me a lot of money but it too would be a false economy to give it up. That night coming away from Katarina & her Wild Horses with such a huge erection in my trousers it still had not gone down by the time I crossed the leaf carpeted Ku’damm. Meeting Clarisse in Brussels. On a wild goose chase to Nuremberg to look for Viktoriya I met the incredible Martina with the most enormous breasts I have ever seen in my life.

Yes, it is true I am travelling to Vienna for Tallulah, and I have always travelled for Tallulah, but by chance along the way I have also discovered so many things that I would not have discovered otherwise–the Libertines, Elena Prokina, Heidi Klum on the billboard. You always find things while looking for something else. While looking for Susi I met Patricia & B Rosa. While looking for Patricia I met Emily. While looking for Viktoriya I met Martina. While looking for Riccarda I met Diana. The Libertines and Elena Prokina were complete chance discoveries that I would not have made if I had not been in Berlin and Brussels respectively (bored in Berlin on a Sunday I brought an Observer & went to the Cafe Zoo to read it & there read about the Libertines and Pete Doherty for the first time. Bored in Brussels I wandered into La Monnaie and on the off chance bought a ticket for I Due Foscari that night & there heard the most beautiful sound I had ever heard in my life when Prokina came on stage to sing), and they are now two of the most important things in my life. I am going to Vienna to see the Maria Callas exhibition but no doubt I will find something else instead. I always find something different to what it was I thought I was looking for. But if I had not set out looking for that thing, I would not have found the other thing. This is becoming the law of my life. I suppose if I go now expecting to meet some other thing I will find nothing but the original thing. Life is a see-saw. As soon as you think you have worked out its hidden laws and mechanisms, they swing back the other way and become the opposite. It is more than anything travelling, though, that keeps them swinging & keeps giving you glimpses into their internal workings, like looking inside a watch. As Kenneth Williams wrote, none of his trips to Tangier were ever what he could call truly successful, but they were important in that they kept the pendulum swinging. Ernest Shackleton kept going back South, even though none of his expeditions ever had any clear aim. It was enough to be heading South again. There is something in my soul that means it is enough to be just heading South again, and South in my case meaning my four Stations of the Cross, my four Cities in the Autumn Stars, Brussels, Munich, Vienna and Berlin, with occasional forays as far as Venice or Budapest or Oslo. 

I have almost forgotten what it is like to sleep at night. I just lie there and stare at the ceiling and have to give up. I love to be awake all night reading or writing while the world is quiet. Days are noisy and full of people, so it is a pleasure to sleep through them. It is cheaper that way, too. This “loan”  I have taken out of £6,000 is vital to pay for my travels which gives me my vital observations which go to form my books. You have to speculate to accumulate. To dare is to do.

But wouldn’t it be nice to go so I can just be in Vienna for three nights & relax, I am thinking now? I will be travelling to Berlin in January for La Traviata and Carmina Burana, and back to Berlin in April-June for Katarina Dalayman in Salome, and maybe Brussels on 11th June for Violeta Urmana. While the Continence of Scipio is upon me, and I do not kid myself it will last, it is a fantastic chance to finally make an inroad into my credit card debt. I may never get another chance again. Crazy to take advantage of this financial control by blowing it all straight away in a four day trip to Vienna, when there is not really anything special for me to go for at this time. I will take the week off in September and use it to do some writing in my flat. I will not be going to Vienna, I think, until maybe the New Year after the Berlin trip, or maybe even December just before Christmas. I have slept every day for three whole days. I slept all day Thursday, Friday, and even today. I left mother’s at 630PM to get my train straight to work. Another couple of rainy days coming up, and Monday should see heavy rain. It is not BORING to not be going out at all now, it is FANTASTIC! It finally gives me the chance to concentrate on the classical music and the writing.  Finally I have a chance to do something about the overheating of the planet, and stop it getting any worse at least. I have not felt any urge to misbehave at all over the past two weeks. It is not as if I even have to fight it. This will be the biggest and best thing I have ever done in my life, if I can do it.

Oh but I would so much love to be in Vienna! But really the nights are so light still. The sun will not be setting until 7:20PM when I get there. How much better to go in November when it sets at 4:30PM! Let that be my rule, never travel until the clocks go back at the end of October. It is exciting to think that by the end of December I could be at exactly the point I was at the end of December last year. I could have climbed back out of the valley of despair. Having gone from -2255 to -4235 I could be back to -2276. Could be. Only if I carry on like this, doing nothing but going to Calcutta for a couple of nights a week for a nightcap, and preferably going home to mother’s. Then I can reward myself with the trip to Berlin in January, maybe a trip to Vienna as well for Christmas, and the trip to Berlin in April for Katarina Dalayman as Salome. Wouldn’t it be more exciting to think of going to Vienna in December rather than the still light start of September?! Vienna at Christmas would be a genuinely exciting prospect. That is my new goal! Can you imagine sitting in the bar of the Dorint half past four in the afternoon having come in from the museums with the lights all glowing and black darkness already outside, maybe snow, and people rushing around in their fur coats back to the warmth of the hotel! Oh how could I think of going in September! If I went in September I would not be able to go anywhere for Christmas. In fact, I have never been anywhere at Christmas. I need to request the Christmas holiday soon as those dates always go really quickly. Now I can plan my Christmas trip! That will replace the emptiness I was already starting to feel at cancelling the September trip. Oh I am already so excited about Christmas in Vienna! By Christmas I could either have £2,287 sitting in my Woolwich account, or else only owe £3,900 on my credit cards, a level I haven’t reached since before I moved into my flat! But yes–Christmas in Vienna. Finally I have reached a compromise, between going and not going, and my devil and my angel have shaken hands with each other on the deal. I feel as excited now as I did reading the Sleeping Beauty is a Junkie article seven years ago. In fact I have never travelled anywhere in December, not even in November, until my one night seeing Prokina in Berlin. If I can keep up this continence, how I will have earned it, and how proud I can feel sitting in that Dorint bar come Christmas-time!

What great joy there is in just drinking glass after glass of coke rammed full of ice! (6th August 2006)

What great joy there is in just drinking glass after glass of coke rammed full of ice! You do not need to go drinking beer all the time. What great joy there is in having a heavenly cod & chips in Dionysus on a Wednesday afternoon! Honestly, thinking about this cold icy glass of coke and this gorgeous fish & chips feels with me with more joyful reminiscence than all of my last year’s worth of visits to the Midnight Bell and Cotton Club put together. Tallulah is over for me. Once I started getting involved with the girls, everything was ruined. Never connect. That is the only way to maintain pleasure in this world. As soon as I connected with Florence and crossed over that line, the Midnight Bell was finished for me. As soon as I connected with Jolanda and Melani, the Cotton Club was finished for me. When it becomes personal it is ruined. Transcendency must be anonymous or it will not work. The lenses were smashed as soon as I bought a drink for those three girls. Getting to know them brought me no pleasure whatsoever, whereas lusting after them anonymously from the dark corner had meant so much, had been so life enhancing, and produced so many of those “high moments that persuade us to put off suicide”. As soon as I come out of the corner & get to know the girls, I think that’s it, I might as well end it all now. The catastrophes of love are what persuade us to kill ourselves, to hang ourselves in a Kings College Hospital noose. No one was ever pushed towards suicide by ogling a beautiful huge-breasted stripper from a dark corner with a beer in one’s hand. Those are the high moments that persuade us to put off suicide. Once you try to get involved, the pain and tension and despair and jealousy start again. Love is the death of people, not animal lust. 

I have always regretted not taking my chance to get to know Black Bob or Gold Dress in the old Cotton Club days, the Classic period, the Jazz Age, the Golden Age, the Minnie the Moocher, Sneaker Pimps and Shining Road days, but looking back now it has preserved them as perfect memories, like fixed in amber. The last night I saw Gold Dress girl in that gold dress and gold shoes, dancing to that dirty song about fucking in the jungle, after I had just come from the Emil Nolde exhibition and then The Beast at the Everyman, and it was Christmas, and the place was packed to the rafters, and the atmosphere was the greatest ever, and she seemed to dance only for me, and I did not know then that it would be the last time I ever saw her, but it has been preserved for all time as a special special memory, I will carry forward no precious memories of Florence or Jolanda or Melani, though they did once give me such high moments, because it has all been ruined in pain and recrimination and anger, because I got involved. I just want to forget them now. The high memories I have of them have been spoilt–because I crossed the line & connected. Never connect! Resist familiarity at all costs! Speak only to the girls you don’t like, never to the ones you do! 

From the disaster that the Midnight Bell has become, I carry forward only one rich memory and that is of Janet. Her extraordinarily dirty stripping I have never seen the like of before or since and will be preserved in amber within me forever. The time she danced to Madonna’s Material Girl remains one of the primal moments of my life. What could challenge it? The Spanish Penelope Cruz lookalike dancing to Sex on the Beach on my second ever visit to the Bell many years ago. Gold Dress girl at the Cotton Club. B Rosa dancing to Jay Z’s Threat in Munich. Irina dancing to Eternal Flame, in Munich. Elena dancing to Tu M'a Promis, in Munich. Susi dancing to Phil Collins in Munich the first time I saw her. Susi dancing to Garbage No 1 Crush and Sting’s A Thousand Years in Munich, when I amazingly saw her again. It is no wonder I kept going back to Munich. It is like people say you should never meet your heroes, because you will just be so disillusioned. I wish I had kept Florence and Jolanda and Melani at a distance. The actor Rodney Bewes tells the story of how he used to worship Peter Osgood when he supported Chelsea in the 60s and was so thrilled to meet him in a restaurant, but Osgood just made some lascivious comment about Bewes’s wife and that ruined all the hero worship Bewes had previously held for him. 

How I wish I had done something with Irina though! How I wish I had done something with Susi! If you don’t connect, you are always crucified by what might have been! Pink at the Cotton Club dancing to The Stripper theme, and Wicked Game, also remain perfect amber preserved memories, because I resisted getting involved with her upstairs, though opportunity was there. And how can I forget pink boa girl who danced mesmerisingly to Grace Jones at the Cotton Club in its Golden Age, and Black Feathers just in the Golden Age’s dying days, when the Roman Empire was about to be sacked by Barbarians and the light extinguished. Apart from Silver Dress Fat Bottomed Girl at the Carnival, that place has numerous very smutty performers whose memory I will always treasure. With such a rich store of treasured memories, how can I not keep going back to the Shining Road for Tallulah? For one thing the Carnival is long gone, and the Cotton Club means nothing to me anymore, spoiled by my clumsy attempts at involvement. The White Coffin has been completely ruined by the new management. The Goethe girls of Sexyland were always curiously bland compared to the White Coffin girls anyway. Tallulah in Brussels will always mean Clarisse and is otherwise dispiriting, and in Berlin there is no stripping to speak of at all. The one place I ever found, there was only two other men watching, the dancing was desultory, and I felt more looked at by the girls, than me looking at them, which is not the object of the exercise at all, and culminated with the girl offering me a private dance for 25 or sex for 80! 

That is the glory of Berlin, of course, everywhere is a brothel. The sex cinemas exist only to get you to fuck the girls in a room, the strip clubs exist only to get you to fuck the girls in a room. There are no sex cinemas for sex cinemas sake, and no strip clubs for strip clubs sake! Berlin. No wonder I keep going back to Berlin. Vienna does not even have sex kinos [HOW WRONG I WAS!]. You just walk into a bar full of ten or twenty girls all looking at you, and again you will sit there with a drink feeling so uncomfortable, and you have no chance to relax and feel sexy. Perhaps if I was very rich I would enjoy it, but in my financial straits Vienna is a very dangerous place. I will always look back at Maria as being without doubt the most beautiful girl I have ever f—d, however. And Harrieta was one of the loveliest and warmest whores I have ever shared a drink with. If only I was rich. Maybe I should move back home to my mother’s house, just so I can pay off my debts for a while, and travel again. But no. But how I want to be crossing Olivaer Platz and the Ku’damm on my way to Stuttgarter Platz again! How I want to be exploring the Gurtel again! How I want to be rounding the corner of Schillerstrasse again into the White Coffin!

All I like doing on my days off now is drinking and watching the girls strip (21st July 2006)

All I like doing on my days off now is drinking and watching the girls strip. There is nothing else. No more cinema. Though I would like to see Taxi Driver at the Empire. And Rebels & Martyrs at the National Gallery.
What name can I give to Sunset Strip? The Cotton Club? The Black Feathers Club? The Tallulah Club?
I am eccentric and wild. I work as a Night Manager in a quiet West End hotel, living like a church mouse. Heavily in debt I spend all my money on drinking & strippers & occasionally whores, while writing my books. Whenever anyone meets me they are concerned and shocked “Are you alright?” “What’s wrong?” “You are unhappy” “You seem distant, and not relaxed?” “Cheer up, mate. It’s not that bad!”
Whenever Jodie Foster’s Tallulah comes on, I feel all the love in the world engulf me. The love of my life that I feel in those places despite the derision that they gradually start to feel for me when they get nothing out of me, how derisive —— is! I feel like going next Tuesday just to spite her. But no, that is not me. The love of being drunk, and increasingly lost in myself. That is when I am happiest, and feel most loved, and comforted. I had to make do with that for the first year of my life. Oh if only I could travel again! To Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, yes even Munich, and Oslo, and Budapest.