Olivia's Diary II

Read Part 1 here.

Beauty, Beauty, Truth and Beauty,

Where did Beauty go?

Dead between Freedom and Duty,

Killed down on the road.

***

I see her sometimes, blinding me. White so hot it could burn ashes into snow.

Why is Medusa, a minor character amongst the Greek pandaemön, so familiar to us some two thousand years on?

Why is she enshrined with Helen, Homer, Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, Hector and the Cyclopes in our popular imaginations?

Even Perseus, who slew her, fades into the background with his familiar Pegasus and Andromeda, none so haunting as Medusa who haunts her victims, freezes her voyeurs, scalps her volupteurs, vital looks alone.

The true mystery of Medusa is how beauty itself is frozen, imported to the eye, fixated, obsessive, delirious, reaching onwards, forwards, drawing out of possession. How it commands the eye, not freezing but impelling it, driving it like a doe with a javelin struck deep into her breast. moaning and weeping yet struggling further into the forest, bleeding silver blood into the earth as she dies.

Medusa does not freeze the eye. She freezes herself, possessing herself in eternal pervoiré.

A strange thing, an eye, to steal the soul of another and save it.

***

In the airport. Where the fuck is my taxi, man?

Trailing baggage behind me, tangled hair a bloody mess. Shades on, fuck off, pretend to be important.

Glance at the magazine rack while buying cigarettes. Lifestyle, how predictable.

Some countries sell Playboy in the airport, mind. One of the redeeming qualities of the Germans. Whenever I’m in Berlin I treat myself, and the cute Brandenburg shop girls don’t know whether to smile or giggle.

German women, eh?

Liberal, loose, fucked nazis.

No sign of taxi man so I sit and order coffee. Espresso like black treacle. Fabulous. Fat Italian wives and children at the other tables. A mad Afro guy begging for change.

So much for Romance.

Check my phone, messages from Harold the fucking Jew.

“Call me. I have work for you.”

Sorry, Harry darling. I’m occupied for the near foreseeable.

Better leave him hanging. Revenge for all the times he’s disturbed me. He’s a good agent, and we have an abusively good relationship.

He gets to take out his Jewish Mommy Issues and I get paid.

No message from Gina. A bloke saunters past with a 70s power tash.

Maximo Sleaze, ok, I’m interested.

Exchange knowing winks, he gestures to my free seat.

Orders his espresso, be my guest senor.

I came of age in what one might call a Golden Age of Glamour.

90s Britain, cheap photo porn raising itself to the status of a moderately acceptable social artifact.

No cocks and pussies, mind, that’s all top shelf, mail order, basement dungeon, dial up modem. We’re talking a working man’s Playboy, the Page 3 proletarian Bacchanal. Dirty jokes, tabloid headlines, sporting news, and beautiful young ordinary women sharing their tits with the world for a shot at money and fame.

Juvenile sexuality, perhaps, male gaze certified and stamped, but what of Boticelli and Titian? Are we to suppose that their great beauties were painted from memory alone?

And why, when we have the machines to paint the world in a thousand hues of Venus, would we refuse? Should such a right be denied to the lesser orders, that they offer up daughters for the worship of holy Cytherea?

Beauty finds its way. The figures of delight seek the eye as much as the eye seeks them, whatever the Caliphate claims about liberty and justice. The female plays for the male gaze, to put it very badly.

Chattering urban women and your man-dogs, screeching and squawking against “sexism in the media”. Fuck off, newsflasher.

Communication, come together, together as one.

You get the gist, Romeo.

The libidinal pulse of pulverised Palestinian carcasses and raped Israeli daughters is scintillating. We watched the killing fields of Ukraine with masochistic fangs.

The inquisition, driven by the proverbial bitch lesbian fat professor dyke brigade – here’s the thing. I’m a bitch lesbian (not a butch, mind), wet as they come. I blame the straight middle class girls.

Posh little neo-Victorian governesses, teachers, charitists, barristers, columnists, quacks, Fabians, Jews, all vicious that the common girls are getting more attention than them.

The cult of Venus teaches thus, and they hate it:

Bodies are Blades, and he who fears not Helen will have his home in ruins and dust.

In a war of image and electricity, skin violence, and violence wins. To be drunk on peace is to be neutered and to be neutered is to be mocked. Destroy thy foe.

As our holy Mother Sancta Jordana sayeth, “I change my tits like I change my shoes”, an artist of knife and mirror, bloody stitches, scandal and fame.

The Barbican. The name itself tantalizes. What the fuck is a Barbican?

A concrete temple in a glasshouse desert, modernism shrieking in the wind at stock traders with broken spines and finance bros with bad taste.

Throbbing pulse of futurism, closest London has to fascismo-gothic. Overrun with swine, bourgeois faggots and primadonna cultcha vultchas.

I sit here in a tweed jacket looking like a fucking dyke and laughing at the skinny men and American exchange students.

Faux-hemian festival monument, testifying everything that was once cool still pulsing big Frankenkapital in its veins.

London Jazz show this evening, how sweet that New York swung in from the past. Sex, blood, danger banished, no negro croon, mere Africans expressing their beat-up souls for cash. Forget bitterness wrapped up in blue melodies and mute, meandering witherings of Europe, forget sax-trumpet tribute to smoke and sin, forget underbelly screech for bourbon and bootleg gin.

Just Londoners arrayed to clap and conform their diversity.

Fuck it, taking my chances with the weird Malay boy in the corner, jacked on a smoothie watching a stream on a gaming laptop. Pink purple neon and tacky plastic cyberpunk adorning the machine excrement on his fingers.

Join the sofa beside him, acknowledged without a word or even eye contact. See you on the other side, kid.

Salut.

Geeza looking at me. Me looking at him.

Speak first, muthafucker. What’s your game?

Smiling, moustache twitches. Sips his coffee.

“I know your type.”

My type? Thick Italian accent doesn’t mask his scorn one bit.

But apparently I’m in the mood to dance.

“Oh yes? And what’s that?”

Condescending British women’s playbook 101. Thank you Camilla Berkshire School for Girls.

“You’re running away.” His eyes twinkle.

Starting to piss me off now. I’m here to play.

“Takes one to know one”.

He shrugs.

“I knew someone like you. She’s gone now.”

“Gone where?”

Silence.

Sadness.

Got you, muthafucker.

“America” he says at last.

Acrid word, rings like a sucker punch.

Twinkle twinkle little star, noone knows where the fuck you are.

“What’s she doing there?”

“Singing.”

The story comes together before my eyes. Father to a musician. Run off to make her name.

“She’s just like you,” he adds. Smiles, finishes his espresso, gets up to go.

“Hang on! Don’t go. Why do you say that?” Shit. He’s got me.

He frowns, moustache twitching. Shakes his head, nothing to say, but now I’m tearing up and don’t want him to go.

Eyes lock, aeons apart, possessed.

Stars crash around us, echo’s lonely mist.

When was the last time one of us was kissed?

“Remember the past” he mutters. “It may be all that you have.”

Gina texts, driver is drunk, instructions to take the bus.

Suddenly all the fun is fucking gone.

What the fuck am I doing in Napoli chasing a filmstar?

Me, Olivia Fox, at best a witty awkward dyke. Blood Sappho on my better days, right now a mess with a headache.

Fucking mustacho. What’s his problem? He’s over there buying a newspaper now. I hope it eats him.

God.

What am I going to do?

Thinking, thinking, options, options, no good options.

In case of emergency, take the moviestar exit.

Gina.