Serpent's Egg Day

 

It's been a lurid sexually explicit year (14th Nov 1997)

It's been a lurid sexually explicit year. Berlin babylon. Perhaps I should stop getting the Star, that sets the agenda and refuses to let my mind concentrate on more serious things. Let's face it, I'm doing what I want. But I miss companionship. You've got to come up with an act, to come out from behind the curtains at the side of the stage with.

I want to enter that Berlin melting pot (13th November 1997)

I want to enter that Berlin melting pot: decadence, sin, pornography, sexual exploration. £30 is too much for a book--except one by me. The lure of Soho will never go away. DO go to sex films and sex dancers before football nights and opera nights.

They're ugly (7th November 1997)

They're ugly, they open their mouths and ugliness comes out, they want to smear me with their ugliness because they resent me for my beauty and my intelligence and my serenity. They hate me for being happy in myself. Well, I'm sorry, but I can give them no satisfaction. They destroyed Oscar Wilde, but they will never destroy me, I'm terribly sorry for them. They want to take my serenity away from me, well I'm very sorry for them, but they haven't got the ability to be able to succeed. They must continue to be frustrated. 

"This strategy is consonant with the tendency of Weimar society in general to test continually the limits of sexuality in relation to legal (or moral) jurisdiction. The cultural artifacts of the Weimar Republic evince a fascination with sexual transgression and the violation of traditional taboos through the exploration of pornography, prostitution, androgyny, homosexuality. Modernity to the Berlin of the mid-1920s entails a sexual expressivity outside the constraints of love or convention. Sexual secrecy--aligned with the bourgeois repression confronted by the newly popular psychoanalysis--is annihilated in an excessive exhibitionism. Accounts of Berlin, such as the following by Stefan Zweig, were common: 'Berlin transformed itself into the Babel of the world'." 

I am exploring pornography, like Egon Schiele. 

To Louise the city's erotic smorgasbord was the most pervasive and intriguing attribute of 1928 Berlin (4th November 1997)

"To Louise, the city's erotic smorgasbord was the most pervasive and intriguing attribute of 1928 Berlin, 'where the ruling class publicly flaunted its pleasures as a symbol of wealth and power.' No account of the city's sexuality at that time is better than her own: Sex was the business of the town. At the Eden Hotel, where I lived, the cafe bar was lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street outside...Collective lust roared unashamed at the theatre. In the revue Chocolate Kiddies, when Josephine Baker appeared naked except for a girdle of bananas, it was precisely as Lulu's stage entrance was described by Wedekind: 'They raged there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage.'" 

"Wedekind's controversial writing embraced Freud's thesis that civilisation is based on the suppression of the most basic human instinct: the erotic. He preached a 'revival of spiritual sensuality and bodily pleasure'--an unattainable freedom of the flesh that outraged late Victorian morality...Wedekind also practiced what he preached. He delighted in scandalising the fin-de-siecle bourgeoisie with his capes and extravagant Mephistophelian garb, and he kept company with avant garde artists and con-artists, prostitutes and petty criminials. He loved bordellos, opium dens, and particularly the circus."