TROY FRANCIS THE DAGESTANI DIVA

 TROY FRANCIS

THE DAGESTANI DIVA

 

I knew very little about Dagestan before meeting Safia and to be honest I don’t know a great deal more now, except that the majority of notable figures who have emerged from the country to achieve global fame and prominence have tended to be fighters of some kind - boxers, wrestlers, UFC combatants and so on.

 

The foremost of these is a gentleman named Khabib Nurmagomedov, a superstar who was the UFC lightweight champion for the longest time, from April 2018 to March 2021, when he retired. 29 wins and zero losses! Imagine that - an undefeated record! Moreover, Nurmagomedov is the first Muslim to have won a UFC title. Not the kind of chap you’d care to look at in the wrong way if you happened to encounter him in the street.

 

Interestingly, a report on USA Sports Today from 2019 reveals that Nurmagomedov is also something of a moralist. The article, entitled ‘Know what really offends Khabib Nurmagomedov? Sexy plays and a lack of government censorship’ describes how the champ railed on social media against a play called Hunting For Men, in which ‘a woman in lingerie could be seen crawling across the stage’. “Why is the leadership in Dagestan keeping quiet?” he asked, encouraging his government to investigate, punish the play’s organisers and then apologise to the people.

 

According to Wikipedia, a 2012 survey revealed that 83% of the Dagestani population adhered to Islam, so this somewhat conservative attitude to art is perhaps unsurprising. What is curious, though, is how I wound up getting involved with a Safia in the first place. Given that my tastes tend more towards the degenerate, why would a woman from such a background gravitate towards me in the first place?

 

I first met Safia at an outdoor nightclub in Sochi, Russia in July 2021. Ah, attraction - eternally recurring, entirely predictable in terms of pattern and yet always so surprising. The music was loud and boisterous. House mainly, but they dropped a souped-up version of Rasputin (which the mainly Russian crowd loved). Safia was on the dancefloor with a couple of friends, dancing slowly, almost contemplatively, as though there was something else on her mind. She wore a short summer dress and her dark hair ran down her back to just above her waist. I watched her dance. There was an innocence about her that appealed to me, but at the same time her beauty and something about the way in which she moved ignited a more visceral desire in me.

 

I walked over and spoke with her directly - I’d seen her dancing, found her attractive and wanted to get to know her. Unlike in an English nightclub, where her friends would likely have shooed me away, or possibly called the authorities, the friends were respectful - albeit not overjoyed at my intervention - and they moved away slightly to allow us time to talk.

 

The conversation was not extensive. Safia did not understand much English, and my Russian remains pitiful. But she got the idea that I was hitting on her and we exchanged numbers. In a situation like this you are battling on a couple of levels simultaneously. For one thing, there is the aforementioned language barrier. For another there is the ear-splitting music and the general hubbub of the dancefloor. Best, in many such cases, to get the lady’s contact details and follow up later over WhatsApp, where you will be at leisure to render your bon mots in her native language by way of Google Translate.

 

I wasn’t expecting much to come of this brief meeting, however. Ideally you will spend a decent amount of time talking to your new acquaintance in order to (hopefully) ignite some attraction and to see whether that elusive ‘spark’ is present or not. And one problem with dating in a foregin country is that a lot of the time you are flying blind - you just have to assume that she likes you and proceed as though she does, even though any tangible evidence of this is yet to be revealed.  

 

Safia left Sochi for Moscow, where she now lives, the next day and I travelled to Ekaterinberg shortly after that. But against all odds we remained in contact over WhatsApp and Instagram. And some time later, when I returned to Moscow, I hit her up and we arranged to meet.

 

 

The Hookah Lounge once more - Timeless off Tverskaya Street. Well, it has become my favourite date venue. These girls all love ‘kalyan’ after all, and apparently the tradition for smoking it is alive and well in Dagestan in particular.

 

That hookah paradise! The golden glow of the room! The low leather couches! The grave and respectful Russian waiting staff! The incongruent Union Jack cushions! The cool electronic lounge music! The beautiful girls and snappily-dressed men on secret assignations together! The mirrors and the secret passages, the discreet cubby-holes where you can sit and smoke, each decorated in a discrete and anomalous style - faux coal fireplaces, huge screens where SEGA games play, bearskin rugs, antlers protruding from walls, and rugs inscribed with dizzyingly complex patterns.

 

She arrived, beautiful in a dark magenta trouser suit, her long dark hair carefully straightened and parted. Now we would get to know one another!

 

‘Hello, how are you?’ I ventured.

 

She screwed up her face in puzzlement. 

 

‘What?’ she responded.

 

OK, plainly this was going to take a little more work.

 

‘Google Translate is our friend,’ I said, gesturing with my iPhone.

 

Soon - with a hookah procured and a California Love cocktail for Safia plus a sparkling water for me - we were sitting together happily volleying banterous conversational gambits between the two of us, translated on my phone. It may seem strange to operate a date entirely via a digital translation medium, but I can assure you from personal experience that it is not only possible, but that it can be enjoyable too. The key thing is that your partner is happy to play along, which Safia definitely was. Pretty soon I’d found out that she was a tourist rep for Dagestan, selling it as a destination to prospective holiday-makers, and that she’d had a particularly busy time over the summer as the pandemic and travel restrictions had compelled Russians to holiday within the republic for the most part, rather than venturing overseas.

 

Safia was passionately proud of her homeland, describing as she frequently did the stunning natural beauty of its mountains, lakes, forests and beaches. This was a trait I found admirable and touching in equal measure.

 

Perhaps to demonstrate my admiration I placed my hand on her thigh. ‘We should go and listen to some traditional Dagestani music together,’ I said.

 

‘Where?’ she asked.

 

‘I’m staying just over the road. We can walk there in just a few minutes.’

 

She paused momentarily and then agreed. But if I’d hoped that the evening was to end with intimacy of the erotic kind I was to be sorely disappointed. As we neared my hotel she wrote on Google translate.

 

‘I like you Troy, but I don’t want to sleep with you yet. We hardly know one another at all.’

 

‘There really isn’t very much to know’, I said to her in English. ‘I am exceptionally shallow. You’ve probably got the jist of it already.’

 

She looked at me confusedly.

 

‘No problem,’ I translated into Russian on my phone. ‘Let’s just go and relax’.

 

She nodded, and I led her into the hotel.

 

I have noticed that there is little rhyme or reason to the sorts of women who are attracted to me. On paper there was no way that Safia and I had any business hanging out together, but it was clear that she liked me, and I was certainly drawn to her. As I was to discover, she was a woman actively rebelling against the traditionalism of her culture and upbringing, which I suppose is why I was now becoming a bit player in her story. But that didn’t mean she was ready to embrace good old Western sexual degeneracy on the first night. There were many more scenes to be played before we might finally merge together in the act of passion.

Cry-Baby Nano the Artist (2017)

The Small Matter of Tongues & Blood By Matt FreeMatt

The Small Matter of Tongues & Blood

By Matt FreeMatt

We were decked out in clothes that would be out of place at an orgy but in line with a christening. The cobblestone row created an echo on the nearby buildings that originated under her designer heels. She had a polite smile behind her wonderful fragrance. Layla hooked my arm for the short walk.

Layla appeared to be happy to have someone accompany her that wasn’t intoxicated or a complete moron. She always seemed to be troubled and her heart laid heavy on the surface. I found it awkward that she would turn to me in such a frank moment. I had been derided as a “too serious of a man, one that wouldn’t relax”. Her attempts at humor produced a polite smile at most. But within this time frame in question, I found it hard to smile.

Layla solicited advice from me when it came to her woes connected to her beau. She often was unhappy and it seemed to be a default position. I saw that there was a yearning for someone to cup her derriere firmly and to show her that she was a woman. Her question was not inline with her normal missteps but of a sexual nature. She was indeed without a clue.

It was a small matter of “tongues and blood”; a deep question brought on by complaints of a lack of cunnilingus and faulty lovers. My lady friend’s voice lowered, showing me that she was truly upset that she was denied a generous “eating out” during her monthly menstrual time. I presented shortly after two observations that seemed to fall on deaf ears. It was as I spoke a different language. I did speak of a man’s viewpoint and of reason, but I failed to sing within an emotional hymn.

I made sure she was heard and heard on the level that a “sister” should be, but the experience left me puzzled. Puzzled in that we have devolved so much from bringing our issues to those that need to know into creatures that spill to those that are ill-equipped to do anything tangible. It had left me asking the question: Have we walked down the row this far?

Countess Báthory (Paloma Picasso) takes her famous bath in Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales (1974)

POTE IN TSARIST RUSSIA

 POTE

Reblogged from

https://bdsmmaledrawings.blogspot.com/

English translation by Google

Two more experienced ladies & a priest teaching a young woman how to whip a peasant

Russian noble families spent the long, harsh winter locked in palaces, bored. Noble men ate and got drunk, staying drunk for weeks. Amidst the drunkenness, they also raped the most beautiful young servants.

 

While noble women, old or young, could not use their husbands or their servants to satisfy their sexual needs, one of the occupations was torturing employees just for fun.

This scene shows some more experienced ladies and a priest teaching a young woman how to whip a well endowed peasant. 

The servant was tied face up on the bench, had his pants and shirt pulled so that his body was exposed and naked for the lashes.

The women and the priest took turns for hours, lashing the boy's thighs, stomach, and breasts with heavy whips.

During the spankings the man got excited several times with his big hard cock. The women, intrigued by the emotion, tied the base of the penis to prolong the erection. The rich young woman had never seen a member so large and throbbing. She began to especially whip his groin and penis. After dozens of blows, to everyone's amazement, the servant simply came! The semen splashed a lot all over the place.

That`s why the castle women have adopted this brat as their favorite toy all winter long.

Ire In The Age Of Doom-Posting, Pt. 4 By Jon Hall

 Ire In The Age Of Doom-Posting, Pt. 4

By Jon Hall

Last issue, I wrote of an exodus from the “modern” way of living many find themselves currently stuck in. We buy and pay back into a rigged system that doesn’t benefit us – only the ultra-rich. Consider this… cell phones, typically one’s main source of the news, social media, entertainment (regressive mind distractions when binged in excess as many are wont to do), simply did not exist as they do today twenty years ago. Two decades ago, fledgling cellular technology – now proven to negatively rewire the human mind and thought patterns – infiltrated society right under our noses, in front of our very eyes in such a quick span of time. It’s a massive understatement: most do not realize the impact cell phones have had on humanity. True comprehension of the consequences smartphones have had on societies worldwide would first even be admitting there’s a problem. Not only are cell phones location trackers, keeping tabs on you pinging between cell towers (yawn, already know this… don’t care… zzz…), they also serve as “daily programming”. Think of how many people get breaking news alerts or headlines or articles sent directly to their phone. The very instant information is published, it also goes to millions of home screens. From screen, millions will digest and process the info, letting it shape their mindset. Sounds volatile, no? Full disclosure: I carry a smartphone even preaching on this bully pulpit. However, my app notifications are turned off – so nothing from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram… anything. I very sparingly tweet, barely use other socials. No matter how breaking they may be, I’ve turned off any news alerts to my home screen. This is what I mean when I speak of an exodus. For some, I’m sure the prospect of “unplugging” seems impossible. For others, it may come more naturally. Do I still use my phone and the internet? Absolutely. I listen to music and occasionally watch movies. I don’t think I’m hypocritical in these actions as my “vices” don’t control, let alone even effect my daily life. As far as self-imposed isolation goes, it may not be the right strategy for everyone. In fact, I may be best suited to warn of potentially “over-indulging” on this revolt away from the “old world”. You could easily ostracize yourself from social groups or friendships depending on just how far you decide to take it. There is a fine line to be tread, as with anything… The key to it is moderation. For instance, at one end of the spectrum is someone figuratively overdosing on movies, celeb drama, fashion, whatever – filling their mind to the brim with waste. Meanwhile, at the polar end of the gamut there is someone who has inadvertently cut themselves off from friends and family because of the mindset that using any tech whatsoever is corrupting. No. Back to the middle! An exodus. Not only from the brainwashing of mind-altering news headlines but from a reactionary, anger-filled lifestyle as well.

MINERVA ARMATA. CATHERINE MILLET & SHAMELESS WRITING

MINERVA ARMATA

Reblogged from

 https://lamorbidamacchina.wordpress.com/2020/12/22/scrivere-di-sesso-al-femminile-catherine-millet-e-la-scrittura-spudorata/

English Translation by Google

"Eroticism is one of the bases of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry." 

(Anaïs Nin)

 

CATHERINE MILLET 

& SHAMELESS WRITING

The approach with which I deal with this topic must be evaluated from a gnoseological point of view, I do not consider those who approach the pornographic novel, whether it is erotic or obscene, driven by playful necessity (which also often arises and is an integral part of such readings) but of those who approach it with the same intent with which one approaches any novel: the pleasure of reading and discovery.

For a woman, reading an erotic novel written by a man is a way of understanding, a mentality, an attitude, trying to enter an imagination that is mostly unknown to her; with the female erotic novel it often happens that there is a process of identification or detachment generated by the underlying question: Would I ever do such a thing? 

I guess it's more or less the same for men. However, when one confronts the pornographic novel compared to a detective novel, for example, one enters a world in which personal involvement is much stronger, our desires, taboos, tastes, our inhibitions condition the reading; even when the tale is played out in the way of fiction. In the detective novel we can enjoy the plot, be the policeman or even identify with the mind of the murderer but with the reassuring idea that none of us will ever be a murderer. In the pornographic novel we know that sooner or later a situation could arise before us and the identification no longer becomes a hypothesis but a real fact. None of us assume we are a killer but we know we are a lover.

As I mentioned in this blog, literature is mostly about men narrating women, and although they often have sex with women, women have played a rather passive role in all of this, in bed and at the desk (in reality this passivity is more imaginary than real but especially as regards literature it was not easy for women to find a publisher; if we are talking about pornography, then, given the difficulties of men, imagine for them). The more pornographic literature has been a terrain of men who talk to other men, it could have been amusing reading for prostitutes in a brothel but we will have to, perhaps, get to the great ladies of the eighteenth century and the libertine spirit so that some would dare to show off knowing this literature, later write it! 

In the words of Nietzsche, and with the title of an erotic novel written in the feminine “Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.”

All the more if the women started talking about the contents of that recreation, all the more if the women started talking about what caused this activity of "recreation" in them. Obviously, the evolution, the struggles for equality have begun to upset certain attitudes and we can see this since women now speak and write about sex.  

Yet something tells me that not everything is so simple, the author of Histoire d'O Dominique Aury writes under a pseudonym (Pauline Réage) and although already well known in the literary world with other works she will admit only in 1994 (the book is from 1954) to being the author; the diaries of Anaïs Nin already famous for her erotic novels will be published after her death, and this will probably cushion the scandal that a book like Incest should cause.

And let's get to the point: the annoyed reaction or the scandal. I happened to talk about Catherine Millet's novel, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., and I found myself mostly faced with a wall of negative judgments, such as: disturbing, a list of fucks, without an ending or rather a landing point, poorly written.  

The comparison that is immediate to me, given the character of "confession", is with Nin's diaries: I have always been an admirer of Anaïs Nin, of her psychological attention to sex, to her own sexuality, of her elegant writing in which even the crudest elements, although not mystified, take on a lyricism without being cloyingly sentimental; cultured, cosmopolitan woman, she expresses the culture of her time (born in 1903).

The equally cultured woman Millet, art critic, expresses the culture of her own time (born in 1948) in which the path started by women like Nin has undergone further evolution, where the psychological aspects of sexuality are not abandoned but can afford a more shameless language. And although Millet's narrative is undoubtedly even more explicit than Nin's, it cannot be accused of being crude or incapable of even psychological analysis of one's own sexuality. Certainly where Nin is more lyrical, Millet remains prosaic, their viscerality is expressed on two different registers. 

Then the doubt arises that female erotic literature still today, in the minds of some, must adapt to the mentality of women. Already; but what should be the character of a woman? What is her mentality?

The thought that is overwhelmingly revealed to me is that we are still judging the female mentality from the aspect of the male erotic-sentimental mentality and fantasy. A jumble of suppositions and impositions settled over the centuries that still today is part of the same female imagination, often also influencing the erotic way of putting oneself in the feminine. The educated woman will not express herself or behave like a whore, nor will the whore think of being educated; the woman will be available to experience forbidden erotic sensations as long as she is guided by a pygmalion to whom she is romantically linked; or else it will be a virago indifferent to love and, perhaps, also to sex, icy in the pleasure of making men suffer. There is always a combination. 

And then Millet can be read as a catalogue of fucks because this woman does not hide a sexuality that leads her to try everything: multiple intercourse, prostitution, sometimes degradation; it can be read as inconclusive because it does not close a narrative (and how could it if it is still alive and why should it if there is the good and dear habit of the open novel that leaves you the doubt and the freedom to finish the story yourself); it can be said that her book is poorly written because it narrates her sexuality as she feels it, as she experiences it and acts on her own skin.

Beyond taste, which I would never allow myself to judge, in a completely impartial way Millet's writing is curated, the narration of her sexual adventures, also in the considerations of her physical and mental reactions, deepened and ordered through her own system mental and aesthetic (it would be enough to read the titles of the chapters). Millet's is not a declared philosophical system like that of De Sade which, among the descriptions of various couplings, lays the foundations for the upheaval, even through sexual perversion, of a society that does not approve; or at least it doesn’t admit to. The fact that it is disturbing (and I confess that despite my reading it at the age of thirty it created various questions in me) means that perhaps that way of talking about one's sexuality touches an uncovered sensitivity, because let's tell ourselves the truth in centuries of erotic literature we have become accustomed to couplings of any kind and the aforementioned De Sade drags us into his Hundred & Twenty Days of Sodom in a hallucinated cupio dissolve of cruelty. That jolt comes perhaps and often from the freedom of a woman, cultured and intelligent, who appears mentally above average, who describes herself as she "degrades" (the judgement is in quotation marks because it is not mine but of society) giving herself in a lay-by for all the men who want to use her in line. Yet she has her dignity in narrating her own sexual needs or demands by putting on a book a name that corresponds to a face. Nobody feels disturbed by the thoughts of the anonymous queue with member in hand who says nothing and has nothing to say, if not perhaps some crude comment on the girl available. But it is a question of mentality.

MT White
The Artist’s Fortitude
Fame pt II

David Lynch was well-known enough before 1990 but that’s the year his fame peaked with Twin Peaks on television, Wild at Heart in theaters and his directing the commercials for the campaign promoting Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album.

But Twin Peaks was soon cancelled, and by 1992 Lynch’s popularity seemed to have completely reversed. The critics panned his film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, calling him and his American style of surrealism old hat and even his comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World was cancelled. “It was a bad year,” Lynch said. But he kept painting, kept doing photography, and kept making movies in his compulsive obstinance. He just continued what he did before 1990. Retrospectively, did he just spend those years painting, the four years struggling to make Eraserhead while delivering newspapers, followed by ups and downs making films, just to get one year of peak fame? I don’t think so.

BUT!

I also don’t think Lynch wants to be the anonymous guy painting in his studio since he’s embraced the online world of self-promotion more than others. Before ever making films, he traveled to Austria to apprentice under famed expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (only to come home quickly). He applied to the AFI film program—the premier film school in the US—before ever making Eraserhead (shot in the barn at the AFI premises) and took work at major studios for films like The Elephant Man and Dune. He’s admittedly obsessed with old Hollywood icons like Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. He played the Hollywood game. None of this happened accidentally. There was at least some intent behind it. To Lynch’s credit, he did retain most of his artistic integrity through the process, refusing major offers (like directing Return of the Jedi) over more personal work.

With Lynch’s example and others, I’d contend that fame is rarely accidental. As poet Czelaw Milosz wrote, “Life rarely takes care of itself unless human beings decide to take care of themselves.” Someone like Solzhenitsyn intended to win a Nobel Prize. He intended it before he ever wrote one word: “I had heard of them (the Nobel ceremonies) from someone, I forget who it was, in the camps. And at once drew a conclusion in the spirit of our country…that this was just what I needed to make my great breakthrough when the time came,” reasoning, “No one, of course, wants to be the author only of ‘posthumous works’; live just long enough to see yourself in print and you can die happy.” It was the same Solzhenitsyn who walked into the offices of Novy Mir, the premiere literature publication in the USSR, to submit his manuscript for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He claimed to be nervous—he probably was!—reluctant—probably was!—even noted he thought he’d never see his work published in his lifetime—probably true! Frustration, and even resignation, mix in the sediment of our goals—especially as we get older and they seem more distant on the horizon. But no matter how much the sun has set, the sun—the prize—is still in our line of sight. The desire for fame or recognition, and the barriers life presents in the way, can lead to frustration and resignation, producing an overwhelming cacophony, and you don’t know where one thing starts and the other begins.

“You know how good CONTENT is, don’t you?” a friend asked me when he read an early manuscript.

Of course I knew. As I wrote it, I thought I had something special. I wanted everyone to know. But there were doubts along the way. It hasn’t sold many copies, so the doubts are even greater after the fact. But I trust my friend’s assessment because he has good literary taste. His praise should be satisfying enough, I suppose. But it isn’t. I want others to know, and at the very least living authors I admire to read and respect it. But that isn’t for me to determine. I can’t control when or what they read. Maybe people aren’t ready for CONTENT. Maybe they never will be.

Remember, fame and everything downstream of it is temporal and however much we intend, like 1990 for Lynch, it’s not so much fame that is fickle but the determinants of said fame, re: the “audience”, something we have little control over. Twin Peaks was a popular show for one year but its ratings fell and the taste for the show waned. Why? Bad writing? The fact it was scheduled on a different night? Audiences found something better to watch? Probably all three.

Audiences lose their taste for something for a variety of reasons. When I was a kid, I recorded the cover of Cat’s in the Cradle by Ugly Kid Joe off the radio. When my cousin visited, he played it over and over again. Listen. Rewind tape. Listen again.  

Rewind tape. Over and over. After that moment, I never listened to Ugly Kid Joe again—and I’m sure my cousin will say the same. The band had no control over it. Another song I recorded: Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers. I listened to it daily, over and over. But then I stopped listening…until my little brother bought me the band’s greatest hits album years later. And I listened to them again…for about a month. Thinking about all this 15 years later, I downloaded the same album off Apple Music. Red Hot Chili Peppers had no control over my fickle mood. The only control they had was just consistently playing music, so they can have compilation albums or new material for me and others to discover once we are in the mood to listen and explore. But pop bands have a small window. Their young audiences “grow up” and then head for a new music that is more “adult” and don’t want the artists of their youth to grow up with them. Duran Duran had a more “mature” sound with their 1987 Notorious album, but their now adult fans wanted to listen to the more youthful music of Rio or Seven & the Ragged Tiger of 1983. They wanted to listen to the music of their youth to feel youthful, an audio fountain of youth. It’s only when a younger generation can revisit and appreciate the entire catalogue of a respective artist in perspective, that they get a worthy assessment and possibly greater accolades. In my case, I was a little young for Duran Duran’s prime, but my older brother liked them (in a way, the slightly younger initializing the first comprehensive retrospectives of their elder sibling’s favorite acts is a form of “little brother syndrome”). Sometimes the youth in older age start feeling a nostalgia now that they have some more disposable income, and if the musical act is still around, they can benefit with higher ticket sales and touring. But I digress, a little.

The same happens in all creative spheres, even among intellectual appreciation. I remember a college professor saying “Henry James was really popular when I was in college”, 100 years removed from his death but he was no longer “hot”. The Abstract Expressionists were a popular artistic movement until they weren’t. The Western was a popular film genre until it wasn’t. Trends, moods and concerns change. As they change, people who claimed to be admirers also change their assessment of their admiration. Walter Kirn, whose review of Infinite Jest helped jumpstart its fame, now thinks he overpraised it. Steppling related a story how he talked with others about Abstract Expressionism and they replied “I don’t think I ever liked it.” Titanic was the top film of all time…but now falls on top of lists like “The Worst Films Ever Made”. It’s akin to someone telling their lover, “I don’t love you anymore. I don’t know if I ever did.” In a way, they’re ashamed they got caught up in the tide of emotion and passion that accompanies love and are now trying to distance from it at low ebb. Or maybe they’ve discovered a new fact: “You’re not the man I thought you were”. When Solzhenitsyn started exploring historical literature, expanding beyond anti-Stalinism, he lost support among those closest to him. At other times, accolades turning to jeers is also a form of trying to justify a new love. Solzhenitsyn’s influence in post-Soviet Russia, after his return there, was minimized due to a Russian public, that formerly logocentric culture, had stopped reading literature. As Solomon Volkov noted, “The public writers were no longer writers and poets but pop musicians, film actors, and television celebrities, as it is everywhere else.”

No wonder artists like to easily portray themselves as martyrs. Tarkovsky enjoyed fame with his first feature film, Ivan’s Childhood, winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival (having a giant like Jean-Paul Sartre championing his film!), only to meet frustrations with the films proceeding. He called his diary Martyrology, even though he had the full support of Mosfilm to helm his films and eventually European financing. Echoing the Hagiographies chapter, many artists have a tendency to participate and lead their own mythmaking, martyrdom being a recurring feature. But many knew what they were getting into. But, with fickle crowds and patrons, it’s easy to feel like a martyr to circumstance. So, it helps to use said story to propagate your fame. People love a sympathetic hero.

And those who claim to never want fame? Upon some more reflection, it’s more than just a statement of moral superiority. If they didn’t want fame, they’d probably never think about it. “How do you like my chairs?” the barista, also a professional upholsterer, asked me as I sat in a chair at the café. Obviously, she wanted some recognition along with some conversation. The anonymous designers and builders of Chartres Cathedral? Maybe it never entered their mind. Maybe. The lack of authorship adds to its greatness. We never question its authenticity or its stature. Its very existence sits as a testament to it. The one who claims to not want fame? Maybe it’s a fear of fame. A premeditated egotistic statement of avoidance to avert disappointment, like a man who swears fealty to bachelorhood because he doesn’t “need” women or love. Maybe he’s just scared of failure or has been hurt enough. Ego and fear exist together. They originate in fragility, and fame is certainly dangerous for the fragile. Fear dominates the ego, because there’s always the chance you could be revealed as a fraud, not good enough. Failure could damage the fragile ego the most.

I would certainly know.

Troy Francis I Wasted My Twenties. Well, What Of It?

 

 

Troy Francis

 

I Wasted My Twenties. Well, 

What Of It?

 

An all-day rave in the afternoon. On pills and speed, it’s funny how you can mistake the lights in the club - the strobes, the spotlights and so on - for daylight. But daylight still shines brightly - outside, for other people. For those strange people who are living lives that have an aim - getting up early on a Sunday morning to exercise, to spend time with loved ones, or perhaps to work on a business or some other pet project.

 

But here inside, the music - storming house and techno - rages on, and we rage on with it. We. What a strange collection of people. People who would probably never socialise normally, but do so here because they have been brought together by chemical compulsion and anyway, you don’t actually have to speak to anyone because the beats are so loud.

 

It’s a pub that, every Sunday, gets requisitioned for a dance party. A bar in the corner selling cans of Breaker, shots, chasers and mixers and Red Bull. There’s couple of pool tables. They play party house and there are girls. Upstairs there’s another space where it’s dark, hard, banging stuff and it’s mainly lads dancing, serious, in their heads, deep in the narcotic dreamspace. The smell of sweat is everywhere.

 

Time passes erratically. Sometimes a minute seems like an hour, sometimes an hour seems like a minute. You forget where you are, then you regain awareness and you’re talking to some stranger. You don’t remember who you came here with - or if you came with anyone at all - and you have no idea where they are now. Your ‘normal life’ in the ‘outside world’ has become distant and mysterious - a concept unmoored from your current reality, where the kick drums and the basslines and the trancey topline riffs combine with the flashing lights crowd out all rational thought.

 

You’re talking to a girl with blonde hair. She’s from the South of Ireland. She’s wearing a pretty summer dress with a flowery pattern on it. Her hair is long and she brushes it back from her face when she speaks, which she does a lot, excitedly, probably because she’s on drugs too. Well, everyone is here. Who would come to a party like this at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon otherwise?

 

She smiles, you smoke (you could smoke cigarettes indoors in those days), and then you kiss, and her tongue feels rough and she tastes of nicotine.

 

‘I’ve got some more pills at home’, she says.

 

Well, ‘more’ always sounds like a good idea to you.

 

And so hand-in-hand, single-file, you push through the crush on the dancefloor until you reach the exit, and when someone pulls the door open the searing light of the sun forces its way in rudely,  an unwelcome stranger.

 

Luckily you both have sunglasses - well, this was the 90s, everyone wore sunglasses to clubs then. In the street a few spiky-haired guys in loud tartan trousers and ripped t-shirts, their faces white, their eyes crazed, dance to the beats and sub-bass that booms from within. A man and a woman, a married couple on their morning walk, presumably, look shocked.

 

You take a bus back to her place in a quiet area not too far from the centre. You’re still high and the movement of the bus brings you up higher. You are feeling invincible - as though nothing can harm you and - more crucially - nothing can bring you down either.

 

You get off the bus and thank the driver, who looks professionally nonchalant and ignores your outlandish appearance, and you and the girl roll out into the street. A short walk takes you to her place, a terraced house which she shares with three other girls. Upstairs, across the grubby and worn out carpet, her room.

 

It’s small, just big enough for a double bed and a wardrobe. Mercifully, the curtains are closed. She has some pills here somewhere, she’s sure. She searches in the wardrobe, in the drawers, until you take her by the wrist, pull her close to you, kiss, and then you fall down together on the bed.

 

Several hours later you’re back at the rave. You are alone. Did the girl come back with you or did she stay at home? Is she here somewhere? Did she go off with someone else? You have no idea, but it doesn’t matter because the pill you just took is starting to kick in, and a can of Breaker is bringing you up nicely.

 

The night, as they say, is young.

 

******

 

Most of my twenties were like that. I didn’t ‘do the work’. I didn’t ‘make myself into the best man I could be’. I didn’t accrue digital real estate and currency. Well, to be fair, the internet wasn’t around back then. Instead, I gave a free rein to all my basest instincts and my most urgent compulsions. I chased pleasure, in the form of alcohol, drugs and women. I thought I was having fun.

 

In fact, I was deeply unhappy and I was using these things - these substances and behaviours - to try and escape my past, a past that I wouldn’t come to terms with until many years later.

 

Your twenties is the first decade in which you have a far greater degree of freedom and autonomy than ever before (in most cases, at least). In the UK many people have left home and live with friends or flatmates. Some are still at university. Freedom is a double-edged sword though. On the one hand, it’s great - who wouldn’t want to be free, after all? But on the other, it can be hard.

Because when whatever boundaries you had as a child are removed and you can do whatever you want, then all of a sudden it’s up to you. Now you are steering the ship, but you’re doing so with no prior experience and - in my case at least - a good deal of naivety.

 

I went feral almost immediately, which is strange since we were brought up strictly by my parents. No doubt it was a reaction to the middle class strictures I’d faced, and an expression of my addictive nature. Young adulthood was for me a sweet shop, and I was the proverbial kid walking into it and gorging myself on as many sugary treats as I could get my hands on.

 

It was a time when I was far too focussed on trying to impress others. Emerging, blinking, from childhood, I was filled with a deep sense of insecurity and I wanted to prove everyone wrong about what I thought they thought of me. And so I set about dismantling myself, trying to prove that I was in fact a cool, tough, bad boy and not the bookish, quiet and shy individual I’d really been.

 

And it was this absurd desire to prove a point to people who’d never met me before that was to wreck my life for many years to come. Because everything I did - subtly or otherwise - was a reaction to what I imagined others might consider me. I wore ‘cool’ clothes to show I wasn’t a nerd. I listened to the hardest techno possible to show I wasn’t a fey simp. I drank a lot to be ‘one of the boys’. I took a great many strong drugs to demonstrate that I was a rebel with the constitution of a rhinoceros.

 

It’s common to talk about regrets - as in do you regret the past or not? But the truth is it’s immaterial - my ‘regretting’ my past will have precisely no bearing on it. The past just ‘is’ - like a rock. Regretting it will make no difference either way.

 

If I’d have been a go-getter at twenty and set myself up for life by creating some fantastic business would my life be different now? Probably. But you have to learn to love yourself and that includes loving where you are right now.

 

It is also common to say ‘my past made me who I am today’. But that’s not quite accurate. My past happened in the way it did because of the way I am, the way I always was. My present has unfolded this way because of the way I am too. Yes, cause and effect is real, but character is destiny, and the bloody-mindedness that impelled me to wreck my twenties is the same bloody-mindedness that has impelled me to forge a creative career in my forties. It’s merely a question of focus, and whether that bloody-mindedness is directed towards something generally positive or not.

 

The one thing that does displease me now, though, is the degree to which I was focussed on trying to impress other - indifferent - people. And if I were to offer a word of advice to my younger self it would be this: what other people think is irrelevant. Most of them will fall away anyway. 

 

The one thing you must always strive to do is be true to yourself.

PADDINGTON MANSIONS by Ernst Graf

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⦽ PADDINGTON⦽  

⦽ MANSIONS ⦽ 

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Any of you who have had the good fortune to know me for any length of time i.e. more than 2 minutes or more than about one paragraph of my writing, may find what I am about to say next pretty unbelievable but here we go.

Most of the time I hate seeing actresses getting nude in movies or on TV.

I am actually really quite prudish when it comes to this, not because I do not like to see their beautiful nubile young bodies & do not gain sexual arousal out of it, because I do, but rather it just makes me feel prurient, and I FEEL she is being exploited, just to get more people to watch the programme/film in the first place, and then to carry on watching all the way though just with baited breath, cock in hand, hoping she will whip them out again. And usually she does not. They flashed her tits, or her arse, or her pussy, just once, so now they know they have got a captive audience all the way to the end.

And that young actress maybe only had to expose herself for five seconds, long enough to titillate and captivate us, but now for the rest of her life she has to see her naked tits/arse/pussy on the internet, all over the internet. For her family to see, her mum & dad, to see, her kids to see, now or in years to come when they grow up. And all just for a five second quick thrill for us viewers, she has a lifetime of exploitation on the internet for which she will not receive any remuneration at all.

Most of the time it was so unnecessary for her to actually take her top off. We really did not NEED to see her breasts at that point or any other point. I think if directors want to have his actress take their clothes off he should just make a bona fide porn movie, and go all out, and I would no doubt absolutely enjoy it without reservation. There is a time and  a place for everything.

And yes I am hypocritical, for whichever actresses HAVE whipped their clothes off in mainstream TV or cinema, yes I do hunt down those photos/gifs/videos on the internet and enjoy them. But I think it is wrong that they were no doubt pressured into doing it in the first place. It is not that I am being a White Knight, just I hate the directors so cynically exploiting the male lustful gaze and using the girl’s tits in order to make more money for himself.

In a similar vein, I have a deep and abiding love and affection for prostitutes, ‘ladies of the night’, have fallen in love with many of them, but I really do not like these forums where men write up their ‘field reports’ and go into absolutely explicit blow by blow detail of EXACTLY what they did together. I think, even with a prostitute, what happens behind the closed bedroom door should be private between the two of you. It is abusing the girl’s privacy to tell the world exactly what you got up to. You can say she was beautiful, and offer a physical description yes, but it is not gentlemanly to describe the sex acts themselves. 

Like singers, pretty much all songs are about sex, but it is much better even in today’s lurid age to use euphemism, “I want to kiss you” is better in a song than “I want to fuck you”, even though we know kiss is absolutely a euphemism for fuck. Tove Lo had a great song called Habits about a sexually free girl not shy of looking for sex but told in a euphemistic way, but after that she started releasing one song after another whieh absolutely luridly started talking about her body parts & what she was doing with them, and it just came across as cringingly embarrasing and vulgar. If she had sung the same songs but used euphemism in every instance of the vulgar explicitness they would ALL have been better songs to my mind.

Yes, I love pornography, I love prostitution, I love sex dancers. But I also think it is all the sexier if one maintains a discretion about it in most cases. No, I dont always abide by this myself, but I think it is better when I do. I write about these things but I like to do so in a kind of romantic way. Like Marlene Dietrich looks magical in all those von Sternberg films because he blurred the screen. He put a filter over the lens when pointing at her. It is not all mechanical, Slot A/Tab B, even with a prostitute, or even watching a porn film, even watching a stripper, it is better if one brings emotions & affection & tenderness into the description as much as the act itself. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think American porn is the WORST in the world. It is vicious, it is nasty, it is violent towards the women, the men fuck the girls like they actively want to HURT them. I much prefer European porn, as it seems to me it is so much erotic, the women are worshipped as erotic goddesses and it is all the more arousing for it. Most of the time the men never even take their tuxedos off. In British porn the men just look pathetically grateful to be getting any at all, like they can’t believe their luck.

 

There was some talk recently, some ‘online chatter’, accusing me of faking being a degenerate, and I said I hoped people DO think I am faking it and that I am really a church mouse spinsterish fellow, as that will just cover me even further. Knowledge is power, so if people REALLY know you they have power over you. However, if people THINK they know you but really have got it completely and utterly wrong then they are always going to swing & miss, they are NEVER going to be able to hit their target. If you're rich, dress poor. If you're happy, look worried. Constant misdirection. Always give your enemies false signals so they jump to wrong conclusions & therefore make the wrong moves. Like that 'covert narcissism' article I was reading a while ago. Out & out peacock narcissists are easy to spot & deal with; covert narcissists are much more dangerous. If I am thought of as a great degenerate & then I say, for example, that I hate it when actresses get naked in films, I am accused of being a fake! A phoney! You’re just PRETENDING to be a degenerate on Twitter! But you're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I'm saying in real life I'm a very happy degenerate, but if you passed me in the street you might take me for a miserable tradcon. I am a covert Borgia rather than a grandiose Borgia. And this is partly from natural morbid shyness and partly deliberate misdirection.

In my heart and in reality I am a grandiose Borgia but in real life I live like a church mouse or at least I like people to think I do. On Twitter and in my books I'm honest. In real life I'm a liar. This is the 'double life'. Just like strippers and whores, they create a boring cover story to hide what they really do. I'm the same. Another reason why I feel so comfortable with strippers & whores.

Like Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Ernst Graf, Zorro, etc. etc etc. Boring tradcon by day to throw people off their tracks, superhero at night. The great Champagne Pup made a jocular comment this week, ‘True autism has never been tried’ and my instinctive reaction to that was ‘That is EXACTLY what my life has become’! I was in therapy on & off from 1996 to 1998, and I discovered it was something called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which involves basically making you change your thinking so you can fit in with boring normal people again and be JUST LIKE THEM! Imagine. The horror. I chafed against this from day one to day whatever it was I gave up on it. I wanted to be myself to the nth degree and I finally concluded that was the way to rescue myself from my malaise, my despair, my whatever you care to call it. I lost approximately the first 30 years of my life to depression, fear of life. And then in 1999 I went for the first time to Europe, on a Grand Tour which blew my mind, and in that extremest of anomie and solitude and isolation I realised something important, which I now realise can be summed up as “True autism has never been tried”. I decided I would be autistic to the nth degree and exult in it. I would flaunt my autism in the pondlife’s faces. I would provoke provoke provoke them with my rampant autism and autism for me is always synonymous with auto-eroticism. The autistic man who cannot connect with people/girls around him will, surely?, always be drawn to strippers, pornography and prostitutes, won’t he? Or is that just me? To my mind autistic people should always be the biggest sexual freaks. “It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for!” I have seen little other evidence of it I must admit. Maybe it IS just me. So, yes, from 1999 onwards I have turned myself towards ‘True Autism’ & that is my creed, and I thank Champagne Pup for only now giving me a name for it. I have actually coined another name for it— YELLOW PILL. Novalis wrote to Caroline Schlegel in January, 1799, “You have to create a poetic world around yourself and live in poetry.” I would say you have to create a pornographic world around yourself & live in pornography. This is the essence of my conception of ‘Yellow Pill’. Some 'Yellow Pill' truths: 90% of women you meet in a brothel you will not want to sleep with even if they said it was free. 90% of strippers you see you'd rather pay them to keep their clothes on. 90% of porn films you see in a porn cinema are so bad you won't even get an erection. So why on Earth keep bothering? It's like sifting mud for gold. Every now & again you will find a gold nugget, & that makes it all worthwhile. Then 'Yellow Pill' for one night becomes 'Gold Pill'. Looking back at my first three books I see now I was always depressed, in pain, cut up, feeling completely skinless and naked; things only start to change when I start drinking a lot near the beginning of the 3rd book, and commence a series of three visits to Munich and three visits to Berlin. After that I start to have pleasurable, thrilling, dramatic experiences, I open up like a flower, and start to bloom and blossom and flourish. I have broken hearts and tears and rages, but I am starting to have real experiences; I am really starting to grow, and it was allowing drink into my life that was the catalyst and the fuel for that. It was the combustion engine. If the pressure society put me under was the Bessemer Furnace that produced my writing, then alcohol was the combustion engine that got me moving and going places and doing things, which started to banish depression behind me like shedding a black cloak. I find it interesting to look back and analyse my own books, (of course I do! I love myself. I am completely self obsessed and inward looking) as if reading the books of someone else, and working out what kind of person was he, and how did he change over the years he writes about? The excruciating pain that lacerated my soul screams out of Autismus, Lotta, and the start of The Cold Icy Air of the Mountains. It is only when I start drinking more, and through that find the courage to start doing more naughty, sexual things on my travels in Europe, that the pain starts to be replaced by pleasure, and the incredible large-bosomed floozies of Berlin and Munich, and I start to come into myself. By the end of the third book and start of the fourth I am actually tired and wearied of all this pleasure and want something more real and substantial! The fifth will see me finally, after a long struggle (a 3-year struggle when I wrote not a word), having this something real, but after a year of marriage to a woman deeply loved, perhaps starting to regret this longing, and thinking perhaps be careful what you wish for! And indeed trying to wriggle my way back to the pleasure without substance of the previous few years. The sixth book I think will see me completely free once more and living a life of mindless pleasure once more, and that is where I am really up to now. As I always say, it is the strip clubs and the brothels that taught me how to live. First in Soho in London, then to Munich Schillerstraße and Berlin Stuttgarter Platz. In Vienna I never actually did very much; from 1999 to 2013 I only ever had sex with one lady of the night; it was only in the first months of 2014 that Vienna started to come to life for me, with the discoveries of the Fortuna and WSK kinos. Every day I do not see a stripper dancing naked on a stage feels like a wasted day. Every day I do not drink feels like a wasted day. I've decided I do not want any more wasted days. Yes, it will lead me soon to an early grave. So be it. Let me try to finish what I can. Breathtaking bravura. That is all. The breathtaking bravura of the way I live my life. The breathtaking bravura of a beautiful nubile girl getting up on a stage & starting stripping for the first time, and loving it. Can any man really understand the COURAGE, the GUTS, the BALLS, the BREATHTAKING BRAVURA of a young woman getting up onstage in front of a room full of men (& women) & stripping stark naked for a pound in a pot for the first time, & every time thereafter? Or the exhilaration? I have tried sobriety. For 5, 6 sometimes even 7 days at a time, on a regular basis, & I tell you honestly IT DOES NOT WORK FOR ME. They just feel like 5,6,7 completely wasted days of my life I've just slouched miserably to my grave for no enjoyment in return to show for it. No. I have decided—pretty much now—I will be respectable Dr Jekyll only as long as I have to be in order to earn the income I need to survive, but AT ALL OTHER TIMES I will be Hyde.