Sex is good, sex is healthy (27th Nov 1997)

Sex is good, sex is healthy. Nothing erotic, and sexually stimulating is bad. The more erotic stimulation the better e.g. the Kinsey biography, the sensual, erotic, decadent Pre-Raphaelite Symbolists. Beautiful girls at Sunset and Boulevard: I like the sex dancers. Ruth St Denis inspired Egon Schiele. Anita Berber inspired Otto Dix. 

I've had a long erotic abstinence, but what have I gained? My brain being eaten away. 

EGON SCHIELE FREEDOM & RELIEF, no erotic repression. 

My Soho Cinema & Astral visit in September cleared the blockage and got me moving again. It is an injection of life blood, regular shots to keep the red blood hot & flowing, and the brain on the edge of illicit shame & stimulation, bubbling along: it helps my creativity. 

Pornography is my secret, shameful addiction: I've tried to break away from it several times. 

"Symbolism, the most literary, sensual, erotic, decadent (even degenerate and depraved), mysterious and melancholy movement in the whole history of art...The first room of the exhibition is full of these ideal creatures--Helen of Troy, Lilith, Mary Magdalene and The Beloved--all of the same kind, no matter who played painter, all of a brooding lubricity that unsettles a man schooled in sexual restraint and the belief that the lasciviousness of women is a fire of damp kindling." 

"She sees a connection between the Dracula of Bram Stoker's novel, and the mythical figure of the Wandering Jew. She also sees another link between the nocturnal Count and the Whitechapel serial killer Jack the Ripper. The Jack-Drac narrative, she writes, plays out a 'constellation of similar fears, raging from syphilis to alien invasion'. She also throws in homosexuality, feminism, decadence and imperial decline: something for everyone....Women can be bad and wicked in Gothic. Gothic is all about transgression, dealing with taboos." Why can't I visit Soho every week, like I did during the Grosz period? Looking at that picture of Talyn, I do want to go back, don't I? Astral & Sunset Strip. 

The biggest thing in my life is pornography. Philip Larkin had his pictures. Wagner had his erotic urges, which produced Tannhauser, Tristan & Isolde, etc. It is necessary fortnightly hygiene: Van Gogh did it. So I like sex films, that's the way it is. BACK TO BERLIN, 1890s, WITH A VENGEANCE!