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!

What else have I got? (18th Nov 1997)

What else have I got? I like the cold baleful stare back of the models, like Manet's Olympia, or any of Egon Schiele's models. He painted them to explore his own sexuality. I write about the strip clubs. I've had a sad life, that's not my fault, I need the colour & vitality of strip clubs and cinema. Because relationships are grey and indistinct. 

Zola and Manet didn't live in the sleazy prostitute realism of Paris 1860s just for a nine month project, the same vein occupied them for years. Vampirism will occupy me for years. 

The summer months were so empty because I was looking for some substitute for pornography to keep me occupied, failing, and entering the black hole. I only came out with my September visit to Astral & Soho Cinema, leading to Berlin 1890s idea. I have a grand ambition, but now I must return to work and earn lots of money to finance it. Do something useful with my life: does this mean going to work, or writing my book? I am a strong powerful spy, and the girls who want to love me (seduced by my mystery & glamour) must wait and be frustrated. 

I'm a writer, my models (like Manet's Olympia and Schiele's models) are the girls at the strip clubs: they don't come to my studio and lie there while I paint them: I go to them and write about them when I get home. Thursday 30th October, at Sunset then (very briefly) in Soho Cinema, was a disaster because I went so deliberately and nervously and premeditatedly, trying to fix the emotion beforehand, instead of relaxing and remaining very detached and light. I went looking for something and so didn't find it. Going with no expectations and with no sense of its importance, but simply as a time-filler, it is much more enjoyable and sensation-rich. 

So instead of no more going, go very very many times now before Christmas: Boulevard, Astral, Soho Cinema, Sunset Strip. For one day, I stop being me. I hang my normal uniform up here and go out in sinful disguise. My history resumes the next day. It is a page I tear out in advance. Tomorrow is one such "stopped" day, releasing me to do whatever my impulses demand, like the Claridges hotel room was made Yugoslav territory for one night only by king's decree.

I'm exploring pornography (8th November 1997)

I'm exploring pornography, I'm exploring my own sexuality: like Egon Schiele. Toulouse-Lautrec. Wedekind. 

She said it's up to me to tell her what help I need and she will try to provide it: I'm clarifying it for you, so you can further improve your assistance. If we can diagnose the problem better we can treat it better, do you think?

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. 

It was a shame the Carnival Strip club finished before I perfected my wanking technique (11th August 1997, Vienna)

It was a shame the Carnival Strip club finished before I perfected my wanking technique. It was the perfect place for it. Pornography and writing, that has been my year. This would be my whole life, if I had the chance. The blonde Sharon in white-ribbed minidress.