I LIVE FOR WILD, NIETZSCHEAN, DIONYSIAN PLEASURE. I LIVE FOR STIRRING PEOPLE UP. I LIVE FOR DOING THINGS I SHOULDN’T. I LIVE FOR DOING DANGEROUS THINGS WHICH WILL PUT ME ON THE VERGE OF SELF-DESTRUCTION. I LIVE FOR THE SLEAZY THRILL. I AM DEBAUCHED. Debauchery is the royal road to Taoist contentment. The pleasures are great. The rewards are great. I AM–OSCAR WILDE. They are frustrated because they cannot lay a glove on me.
I WANT people to be fascinated by me. Obsessed by me. Singling me out. I’m so perverse, I get a kick out of it. The point is: I LOVE my pornographic life. I love my schoolboy fantasies. I love setting myself into my viscerally pleasurable transcendental state.
I’m going to see my people! My subjects! With my big stiff dick stirring inside my trousers, pressing between them.
I’m going to keep pushing them, and keep pushing them. I’m not going to let them off the hook. The rewards are great.
Every day I am progressing towards my goal. Writing my Bible. Live wildly. Behave disgustingly. The rewards are great. This is delicious, isn’t it. What a rich pot Victoria is. I am creating my religion up in the Himalayan mountains. I love it when I rouse people to hostility—it shows I am getting to them. It shows I am bothering them. It shows I am getting under their skin. It shows I am eating them away. It shows I am poisoning them. It is the biggest thrill. The biggest injection of pleasure into my veins. It enriches my soil. Do some work on the manuscript so I can bring it with me. So every day is really useful.
Live wildly. Behave disgustingly. The rewards are great. I have a life with no taboos. Keep pushing people. keep pushing them. I have chosen my life, and it is eating them away. I have chosen a life of freedom, free of all repression, free of all taboos—this is what is killing them. And I am killing myself laughing. The power I have.
I love it that they cannot repress their hostility for me. It is eating them away. Their resentment, their jealousy. I cannot lose, as long as I’m collecting material for my book. They are so poor, and it eats them away so much.
I specialise in shaking people up. I like fun, and MISCHIEF.
I am making a success of being an autistic prince. The power of my life, the riches. The freedom now. The rewards are great. I am not going to let them off the hook. BEHAVE DISGUSTINGLY, and grin cheerfully.
“What pleasure there is in overcoming this stupidity, this weakness; finding happiness despite their eagerness to destroy it, escaping when they believe they have surrounded me, falling in their midst when they have forgotten all about me!” Flaunt it, flaunt it. Stroll, swagger, grinning smugly past them. The more stupidness I can provoke them to, the more of a rich and delicious success it is for me. I’m not going to let them off the hook.
I am a recorder. I am a photographic plate. Oh this intoxication. What a high. The chance to stir up and provoke so many people at once.
They cannot hurt me, because I get lascivious pleasure out of people desperately trying to punish me. I live to scandalise. I am playing a part, to push people, and provoke them.
They are shackled by thinking about me all the time, while I am enjoying the freedom of my life. It is healthy to have scandal attached to oneself. I like to flaunt at them what scandal I am getting away with. I’m laughing at them, because I’m continuing to get away with it, and flaunting it at them. My autistic trances can never be pricked! Behave disgustingly; wind everybody up, get everybody thinking about what you might be getting up to all the time, it is great fun. The rewards are great.
I am living the life of my dreams. I am living the perfect life now. Be nobody’s darling. Do what you want to do. The rewards are great. I’m not letting them off the hook.
I have such freedom and unconcern. I am kinky and intelligent. Walking along the road thinking about which floozie I will go to next. Feeling so excited to be planning my next day at the pictures, Chandos, then all night at Soho Cinema or Boulevard. Most people’s lives are very boring, mine is so exciting they cannot stop thinking about it. I am WILD. I am off the end of the scale. I have picked my battleground, and I am going to remorselessly grind them into the dirt. Those wonderful Soho girls! The rewards are great. I’m not letting them off the hook. I put myself in extreme places, because there you can learn things.
When did my mood lift, and I become so happy and smug? After last Wednesday at Chandos, Thin Red Line, Orpheus. The realisation “The rewards are great”. The power I have over them: The summer sun does help. I always saw it as my enemy, but it does help. I look forward to returning to Boulevard and Soho Cinema and rooms again. The rewards are great.
I am rampant, and demonic, and I insist on spending 4 hours in Soho Cinema!
I was thinking normally I would have been really looking forward to a night like tonight, midweek evening game at Chelsea, giving me the chance for book-shopping, cinema, Chandos, then Carnival Strip and room, before heading to the match. I have lost that innocent joy, and I will never regain it if I don’t renew my season ticket. But then I think of the last but one time at Soho Cinema, before the Manchester United game, and I so much didn’t want to leave because Breeders was on! Those white tights! I so much wanted to stay all night there. I should have made the most of it.
I will smilingly, enjoyably, keep going to Soho Cinema.
My life is set up pretty perfectly now; once I get rid of the Chelsea millstone, it will be really pleasurable. I am starting to really enjoy my Charing Cross life again!
Good—I want MORE people to be thinking about me. I want MORE people to be obsessed by me. I am pulling all their strings. My scientific researches are going brilliantly; I have stirred the pondlife up, and the material is pouring in now. Let people make their own choices, and give themselves away. I lift the stone and I am indulging studying all the distinct species under this stone. It is my job to stir up as many people as I can—I want MORE! And MORE and MORE! Be happy—that defeats everything. The rewards are great. The more abuse I can attract to me the more pleasure I can get in absorbing it into my red sponge contentment. The more lightning I can attract to myself, the more electricity I can power my laboratory with. I am playing with them, I am toying with them, I am playing them like a piano. I am having FUN. I am killing myself LAUGHING. Still GRINNING HAPPILY.
As long as I can keep doing what I want, nothing can touch me. As long as I can keep compiling my great book of record nothing can bother me whatsoever! I am a genius like Van Gogh, and I just keep going. The rewards are great. It is hard work, but the rewards are great. Like Sean Connery in Outland. Life is to be ENJOYED. It is FUN. It is MISCHIEF. They hate me because I won’t share my riches. I am wonderfully joyfully ECCENTRIC. Everything they do brings me JOY. I am laughing at them, with my deeply furrowed brow, and still indulging my pleasures. I am the black sheep—I do everything I shouldn’t. The rewards are great. It is high risk, but the rewards are great. “The savage envy of the aspiring dunces”. I AM WILD. I LIVE A WILD LIFE. OUT OF CONTROL. A FLAMING COMET. Still keeping my powder dry. Still holding to my line. Still keeping to my plan.
"Throughout the early 1920’s, Jazz was rapidly replacing the more traditional musical forms in Cabaret and Revue but it was not until after the stabilisation of the currency in 1924 that many Berliners had the chance to experience it live.
Josephine Baker became an almost overnight phenomenon from which it was said “the women of Berlin were never the same again.”"
"Marlene Dietrich became an immediate international star on the strength of her performance as the temptress Lola Frohlich in Josef von Sternberg's classic tale of love and obsession. Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is a strict and humorless schoolmaster who is shocked when he discovers the boys in his class have been spending their time at a sleazy cabaret called The Blue Angel, where an entertainer named Lola (Dietrich) keeps the men in thrall and sells suggestive postcards of herself. Rath goes to the club in hopes of catching his students and giving them a severe dressing-down, but he instead finds himself entranced by the carefree atmosphere of the club, and is struck by Lola's earthy, sensual beauty. Rath finds himself strongly attracted to Lola, and she later entertains him in her dressing room. When word of Rath's infatuation with Lola spreads to his students, he is taunted mercilessly, and eventually Rath is dismissed from the school. While Lola agrees to marry Rath, she shows little affection for him and delights in humiliating him, making him her servant and forcing him to play a clown in her stage show."
" a decorated with a bust of emperor and black-gold-red curtains entertainment establishment - "Sideshow" (1900) - shows dignitaries and students who look just as greedy as the dance of a bored her skirt lifted "Sideshow"-girl."
Eros places an artist in conflict with the world, with what is average in life, he wrests him from the middle-class world and transports him to a sphere of tormented and ecstatic decay. -- Laurence Schifano
"The Romance Café was the most famous meeting place for writers, journalists, theatre and film people in Berlin in the Twenties. It was on the ground floor of a house in the Romanesque Revival style vis-à-vis the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, where now the Europa Centre stands."
“Bacon had seen how the Surrealists equated the desire to express something new with the need to shock, and it was to form the core of his own artistic belief. When the ‘wild boy from Ireland’ returned to London towards the end of 1928, he was set on a course that would not only scandalise conventional sexual and social morality. He had something far more subversive to do: to disrupt all notions of what art was and what it could express. Beneath the carefully calculated frivolity and the unresolved pain of a rejected son lay the iron determination of a man readying himself to throw a bomb and be held responsible for it.”
“Total abandonment to instinct, above all sexual instinct, was an ideal which Bacon maintained with astonishing vigour to the end of his days. If he had a sustaining belief, it was in the supremacy of instinct as the only guiding principle in life—a philosophy expounded at length by the Marquis de Sade. Bacon had an expert knowledge and considerable personal experience of extreme sexual behaviour—and of sado-masochism in particular. He made no secret of his taboo in this area. And when he said that he ‘painted to excite himself’, he surely meant to recreate certain extreme sexual sensations. It would be true to say that, at one level or another, much of what he painted is a projection of sado-masochistic practices, though, as if by some odd consensus of propriety, his pictures were almost never viewed in this light during his lifetime.”
"I feel myself to be an alien in the world. If you have no ties to either mankind or to God, then you are an alien."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk, Penguin Books, 1990.
"Philosophy, as I have understood and lived it to this day, is a life voluntarily spent in ice and high mountains - a searching out of all that is alien and questionable in existence, of all that until now has been held in the spell of morality..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1888.
"Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then there's an artist who does and who makes something new and actually thickens the texture of life. But it's very rare...You have to be able to be really free to find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious constraints. After all, life is nothing but a series of sensations, so one may as well try and make oneself extraordinary, extraordinary and brilliant, even if it means becoming a brilliant fool like me and having the kind of disastrous life that I have had. That is it."
Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma, Michael Peppiatt, 1996.
"It's only by going too far that you can hope to break the mould and do something new. Art is a question of going too far. Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before. The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you've got its looking real."
Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1987, Thames & Hudson.
'' Actually, I'm the most ordinary person possible. Its just that I like throwing myself in the gutter. Every artist wants to throw himself into the gutter. Its part of his life, its a necessity. You might say that I lead a gilded gutter life, I drift from bar to bar, from gambling place to gambling place, and when I don't do those things, I go home and paint some pictures. I am completely amoral. If I hadn't painted I would have been a criminal....I have always known life was absurd. Life is nothing but a series of sensations.......Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary...I think of life as meaningless and yet it excites me. I always think that something marvellous is about to happen. How can I trap this transient thing? ''
...Francis Bacon in conversations.
SOHO (1999) 
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