Sebastian Horsley

THE SCARLET HARLOT

I have just published this piece in a woman porno magazine called Scarlet :

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I keep reading that practically everyone on the planet is a dandy and it most annoying. We can’t all be stars because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as I go by.

So what is dandyism? Dandyism is a form of self-worship which dispenses with the need to find happiness from others - especially women. It is a condition rather than a profession. It is a defence against suffering and a celebration of life. It is not fashion; it is not wealth; it is not learning; it is not beauty. It is a shield and a sword and a crown - all pulled out of the dressing up box in the attic of the imagination.

Wilde and Brummell are usually held up as the progenitors of dandyism but neither of these men were dandies in my not very humble opinion. Mr Brummell was aspirational and no real dandy is aspirational. As for Wilde? What a phoney he was! And not even a real phoney! He bred for a start, and no dandy worth the name breeds. He must defeat the species role of his body at all costs. The only place a dandy would push a pram is into The Thames.

This misrepresentation continues in modern times. The idea that David Beckham is a dandy is absurd. Dandyism is social, human and intellectual. It is not a suit of clothes walking about by itself. If Mr Beckham’s IQ had been two points lower he’d have been a tree somewhere.

Russell Brand is called a dandy. I suspect he is in costume. He practices Yoga, vegetarianism and other diseases of the soul. Hare Krishna? A real dandy is more Hari Kari. He fucks Miss Moss. A real dandy would tell Miss Moss to fuck herself. Worse, he recently did Earth Aid! This is unforgivable. The dandy remains deaf to the call of social justice. The depletion of his hairspray is more important to him than the depletion of the ozone layer. Convictions are for dullards, whose earnestness - the worst crime in the dandy’s book - is there to be mocked. As for human rights? Quite obviously he couldn’t give a toss ; he could hardly manage to be interested in the rights of his cock.

Tracey Emin has been called a dandy! The idea that a woman can be a dandy is preposterous. There are no female dandies for the same reason that there is no female Mozart or Jack the Ripper. The key attribute of dandyism - detachment - cannot come from someone with womb. How can one possess style with some pissy farty stink-grub hanging off one’s blubber udder? Forget it, darling. Women are on this planet only as trumpets of our glory.

So who are the real dandies? Baudelaire, Quentin Crisp, Bunny Roger, Tintin, Marc Bolan, Johnny Rotten, Robin Dutt and me - not in order of importance, I hasten to add. All these dandies are roped together like mountaineers heading for the summit of beauty. You see my darlings, true dandyism is rebellious. The dandy is part warrior, part stargazer, part gambler, part crusader, part plunderer, part violator, part martyr. He is fit for the highest and the lowest society - and keeps out of it.

To be a dandy is to aspire to the sublime. Dandyism isn’t image encrusted with flourishes. It’s a way of stripping yourself down to your true self. You can only judge the style by the content and you can only reach the content through the style.

Dandies are a brotherhood of higher types. The true princes of the world. The true priests of the world. Like precious stones, their personalities derive their value from their scarcity. Fancy a fuck?

THE ONLY WAY TO SUCCEED IS TO MAKE PEOPLE HATE YOU. THAT WAY THEY REMEMBER YOU.

Here are the first two reviews of my book …

From The Sunday Times

August 19, 2007

Dandy in the Underworld: An Unauthorised Autobiography

By Sebastian Horsley. These memoirs offer the reader a consistently hilarious season in hell.

Reviewed by Christopher Hart

Sebastian Horsley is a dandy and artist manqué who was briefly famous a few years ago for getting himself crucified in the Philippines. “I’ve suffered for my art,” he forewarns us, “now it’s your turn.” A sexual and intellectual pessimist who lives “poised between Savile Row and Death Row”, or, more prosaically, between narcissism and boredom, he isn’t easy to comprehend. Maybe it has to do with seeing too much too young.

Certainly his upbringing was unorthodox. His mother tried to abort him but failed. “Had she known I would turn out like this she would have taken cyanide.” He was born in 1962, in Hull, “so appalled I couldn’t talk for two years”. The Horsleys were proprietors of the vast Northern Foods empire, and lived in a sprawling Yorkshire fortress. His father was “a drunk and a cripple”, his mother drunk and manic-depressive. She tried driving to the off-licence on a motorised lawn mower when her car keys were confiscated, and when her father died she ate his ashes sprinkled on her porridge. A family photo from little Sebastian’s early years shows his mother “on the floor face down in a pool of her own vomit. On the sofa sits Gogo [his granny], her wig awry, her lipstick skid-marked across her face. Next to her sits Father, his drink in one hand and his cock in the other. Home sweet home”.

Years later, his mother visited him in a clinic where he lay drying out from multiple class-A drug addiction. She sat by his side. “Have I failed you as a mother, Sylvester?” “It’s Sebastian, mother.” That one’s too good to be true, surely, as indeed may much of the book be. But the upside to this horrendous life, and Horsley’s preposterous defensive dandyism, is the humour. These memoirs offer the reader a consistently hilarious season in hell, even if some of the best jokes are stolen, unacknowledged, from sources as diverse as Dr Johnson and Sharon Stone. “I became a vegetarian not because I loved animals but because I hated plants.” “Artists are easy to get on with – if you’re fond of children.” And I shan’t forget his description of Will Self’s face resembling “a bag of genitals” in a hurry.

A sense of humour is also common sense in overdrive, and although Horsley the spiritual aristocrat would hate to think he possessed anything common, even sense, it often redeems him. He knows that taking a lot of drugs doesn’t make him a 21st-century Rimbaud – as Pete Doherty sadly doesn’t. Nor does the road of excess lead to the palace of wisdom. Crack made him sit “in a darkened room for six months watching Home and Away”. His fondness for prostitutes, on whom he reckons he has spent around £100,000, is on a par with the drugs: excessive, but uninteresting.

More original is his swimming with great white sharks; his affair with a Glaswegian gangster; and that crucifixion. He fell off his cross, but at least it hurt. He considered calling the subsequent photographic exhibition, “Is There a God or Am I Too Fat?” Jesus was crucified to save mankind, while Horsley was crucified to save his career. “In my opinion,” he reflects, “we both failed.”

There are moments when your bourgeois stomach turns. I would like to forget, but never will, the manner in which he and Hugo Guinness expressed their tendresse for each other with a cucumber and a lavatory bowl. But you can forgive him a lot, for having produced one of the funniest, strangest and most revolting memoirs ever written. A world without Horsleys would be almost as dull as Horsley already finds it.

******

THE 'ARTIST' WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN CRUCIFIED; DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD: AN UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BY SEBASTIAN HORSLEY

20 August 2007

The Evening Standard

PETE CLARK

The warning - and dear reader, I should heed it well - comes in the subtitle: An unauthorised autobiography. In that small phrase may be contained all you need to know about Sebastian Horsley. There is a sense of self here, of course, but also of rebellion. It's as if even when writing about himself the man is not to be trusted. He might even kick against the traces of what it means to be him. You may also detect the faintest tendency towards the witticism, a Wildean compulsion to meddle with words until they squeal with your laughter. That is here too.

Should you wish to travel further into these dark waters - and, by the way, you'd be a fool to pay for this book because the light-fingered author certainly wouldn't - then prepare yourself for a journey into the dark soul of Sebastian Horsley, a man who has absolutely nothing to declare but his own lack of talent.

We begin with his childhood, which would have been perfect were it not for the fact that the silver spoon intended for his mouth somehow got stuck up his bottom. Father was a rich and contemptuous drunk, mother was a lackadaisical drunk. Sebastian grew up wanting to be a girl and worshipping Marc Bolan who was, needless to say, a reflection of himself, only perhaps not such a dab hand with the eyeliner.

You might say Sebastian had some adventures but the truth is he never travelled further than the edges of his own ego. This man is the ultimate vanity case. He is a self-proclaimed dandy, the type of fellow that thinks a loud suit will make a mark in a drab world. That the rest of the world looks at him and sees only a prat only adds to his sense of supreme worth.

The wittering on about clothes is just about bearable but patience comes to an end with the endless details of our hero's passion for getting off his head.

If there is anything more boring than reading about other people taking drugs, then I have yet to stumble upon it. Even Hunter S Thompson gave it a break once in a while.

Horsley's other great outlet for self-adoration is sex. He is essentially a wanker, as he freely admits, but there are some unfortunate couplings with other people so that a little self-loathing can be added to the mix. The passages involving Jimmy Boyle and Hugo Guinness should be avoided by anyone of a nervous disposition who has recently eaten solids. The passages involving various ladies should be avoided by anyone who has a fondness for the female sex.

The question that may enter the enquiring mind is this: what exactly is the point of Sebastian Horsley? The answer would seem to be that he is an artist who once had himself mildly crucified. I know nothing more about his work.

He is also, however, a tireless worker in the mines of aphorism. There is not a sentence in this book that has not been messed about with, extensively buffed and pored over. No amount of burnished blather can alter the fact that this is a book about someone who, au fond, does not like himself very much. Do him a favour and bin it.

 

******

Well I say!

Wilde said: “When the critics are divided the artist is at one.”

And of course he was right. For a man to be great opinion must be divided on that score.

It is vital that the artist pisses off the right people. If you make the right people hate you, then that will make those that like you, love you that much more intensely.

Besides, Not even Jesus was loved by everyone.

Mr Clarke’s attack wasn’t very well written except that one intriguing line. “He might even kick against the traces of what it means to be him." I like that and may steal it. It’s a Sebastian line.

The review doesn’t really mention the book. He doesn’t like what I represent. You see, I represent, he resents, the life beautiful. You see, my darlings I saw a picture of him …

But maybe he is right. If I read about myself I wouldn’t like me. I would be threatened by me. The only difference is : I would admit it.

Boo Hoo. I am a controversial figure : People either dislike me or hate me.

Of course, I wrote to him :

“A fly sir, may sting a stately Horsley and make him wince. But one is but an insect, the other a Horsley still.”

Good day, you little bald ugly potato face.”

Poor little man. Welcome to the English : A Puritanical, tyrannical, ungrateful, hateful race. He is the unpleasant face of that hateful race. This couch potato face reviews Television programmes for the Standard. He doesn’t even make Television programmes. He reviews them. And he reviews them only occasionally as the stand in for the talented Victor Lewis Smith. Beneath him, there is only a social void.

Poor little spud dud. You see, we all have our fantasies of flying. Life, for most of us, is a process of gradually shedding them. Feather by feather we shed until our wings are bald.

But some of us say : “Not me. Watch me now, I’m going to fly.”

And when we fly we remind others of their broken dreams and broken schemes ; rather than join us they will the fate of Icarus on us so as to console themselves in the fluid of their own failure.

What I love is the FRUSTRATION these so-called writers elicit when they meet someone airborne with sangfroid.  It is so easy to clip a bird’s wings.  No one quite knows how it flies. 

THE DEVIL IS A DANDY

Sebastian Horsley, the artist, was recently crucified in the Philippines.
The resulting images formed the basis for his most recent show. Dandy,
columnist for The Erotic Review and rake par excellence. Sebastian gives
Large an exclusive interview.



G: When you were little, how did you see yourself and how you related to
the world?

S: How did I see myself? Incessantly.

G: When did you first think you might be a dandy? Did you dress up as a boy?

S: Well that was my mother's influence. She used to alternate between an
incredibly glamorous movie star and a tramp. She led me into a life long exotic swoon from which I have never really recovered. When I was ten I saw Marc Bolan and that really did it and then I went through a phase of wearing my mother's clothes, women's clothes...

G: As one does...

S: But being a dandy is not a profession, it's a condition, something you
just can't help...

G: You mean a vocation?

S: No, a condition. It is both a response to suffering and a celebration of life.

G: A treatable condition?

S: Yes, clothes are the medication.

G: When did you have your first sexual experience and with whom?

S: Does Onan the Barbarian count? (masturbation)

G: No!

S: At 12 with an Indian woman who I fell in love with. We remained friends.
I still have the receipt.

G: What is the strangest sexual experience you've ever had?

S: Hmmn... (pause) Look, I'm not a fag, but I suppose the strangest have
been with men. I'd go for men (I don't any more), who were very dominant and potentially violent... that's what I liked. I liked to have my free will
taken from me.

G: What do you think of pigeonhole terms like gay, bi or straight? Are they
realistic?

S: I hate faggots. I take great pride in my prejudice. But these terms are
very limiting. After all, the difference between homosexuality and
heterosexuality is merely a couple of bottles of wine or one smoke of crack.

G: You've lived in Soho for a long time, why?

S: I like to be close to my sin. Also, In a beautiful area I would be superfluous. In an ugly one I am a narcotic. Originally I lived in Shepherd's Market but that went down hill when the prostitutes moved out, but Soho's gone down hill. Ten years ago, on a good night, you could get your throat cut. Now it's full of weave-your-own-yoghurt places, gay hairdressers and coffee bars. There's even a fucking health club. A heath club in Soho for Satan’s sake. That’s like having a brothel in a church.

G: What was your first experience with drugs?

S: Well, I never touched drugs until I was twelve. I remember stealing a friend's marijuana.

G: Do you see yourself continuing the noble tradition of the rake and if so
who are your heroes?

S: I am a peacock without a cause, a rebel without applause. I am also deaf to everything except applause. I would define myself as a Romantic Nihilist and yes, I am a dandy, but that all depends on how you define a dandy. Dandyism to me is not a suit of clothes. Clothes are the least important part of a dandy. Dandyism to me is a spiritual doctrine. It's a way of stripping
yourself of everything, except your true identity, so you can only judge the
style by the content but you can only reach the content through the style. And of course style is merely the outer skin of your ideas. I am actually wearing my thoughts, my attitudes to life.

G: What about your heroes?

S: I am a disciple of Satan and Satin. Actually, my first, as I think I said, was Marc Bolan and then Baudelaire got hold of me. (the decadent French poet of the 1890s) After that Arthur Rimbaud, Francis Bacon, Tintin, Quentin Crisp. Dandies are roped together like mountaineers heading to the summit of beauty. I looked into their mirrors and saw myself.

G: And Byron?

S: Well I don't know so much about Byron, but the way he lived his life...
it was so much more important than his work. You see pictures and books are only things but artists are people. And who else? Well, the Sex
Pistols and Johnny Rotten had a huge influence on me when I was about
fifteen and continue to do so in a way.

G: Do you think drugs influence art? It's often said that artists, poets and
composers take shed loads of drugs. Is this a romantic myth?

S: It's not only a romantic myth, it's nonsense. I don't know who's
responsible for it. Me probably. But this is the connection: - The
type of person who creates is often quite sensitive and that's why he
creates for the rest of us. But that sensitivity, if it's not checked, can
lead to your own destruction. It's not that you take drugs and that makes
you creative, it just doesn't work that way, and the idea of creating on
drugs is as preposterous a notion as the idea of driving a car when you're
drunk. I mean the whole point about being an artist is that he's supposed to
be more aware. The point of taking heroin is to make you forget your
leg's just been cut off. So the connection isn't that you take the drugs and
create, the connection is that the sort of person who is drawn to art is
also drawn to drugs. But I’m actually a drug addict with a painting problem if you must know.

G: What do you reckon is the most unusual cocktail of drugs you've ever
taken?

S: Are you saying my favourite? Or Unusual?

G: Whatever, when you used to.

S: What, like last night or something? No, I'm off now, but injecting, that
was the thing I really liked. The whole ritual, the way you become a
hermaphrodite - a vampire at your own veins. But my preference was speedballing, which is a combination of heroin and cocaine.

G: Heroin can keep you looking young I'm told.

S: Heroin preserves everything actually, except secrets.

G: When did you clean up and why?

S: You see I am no longer a practising drug addict. I'm perfect. I cleaned
up because I couldn't work. And because it was making me too happy. It's a very simple exchange for me personally. If I drink or take drugs I can't do anything else. I reduce the whole of life’s experience to one experience - the drugs. I have this obsession with freedom but drug taking is like placing yourself in another kind of prison. I will sit in this room, I won't answer the phone and the only people I see are my dealers and my hookers. I can't write, I can't paint and dandyism goes completely out the window. As a drug taker I end up fit only for the undertaker.

G: Do you expect to be revealed through your art or be concealed?

S: I live in terror of being understood. No question. That's part of
dandyism - give me a mask and I'll tell you the truth, which is curious.
You know a dandy is a liar who tells the truth. Why I get on people's
nerves, particularly the British, is firstly because I've got the airs and
graces of a genius and no talent and secondly because the dandy is just an exaggerated extension of us all. All dress is fancy dress, except our natural skins. And life is nothing but a game of dressing up and pretending. We all perform our lives - just look at doctors and lawyers - they think they're real people. So, in a way, dandyism is the lie that reveals the truth. And the truth is that we are what we pretend to be. I may be a phoney but at least I‘m a real phoney.

H: So what's your definition of a genius?

S: Someone who brings new meanings into the world. The whole point about
genius is it's very, very rare. Although now the term has gone to confetti. I read the other day that Morrissey is a genius. What does that make Mozart then? Double genius with chips?

G: And today everyone desires celebrity.

S: That's a totally different thing. I used to be a universe, but now I'm
only a star. Celebrity is a comedown, which is the curious thing, not that
I've got it, but the problem is it's a trap, another form of prison. How can you talk about the concept of freedom on the one hand which you willingly give it up with the other? If you are somebody who wants to break through things and find new meanings for yourself, how can you struggle through all these different layers of disapproval, hostility and convention only to arrive at another form of convention? Personally I’d rather be an anonymous star than a famous non-entity.

G: Penultimately Sebastian, what words would you choose to define yourself?

S: I'm a Romantic Nihilist. As Coleridge said, Romanticism is something
ever more about to be. I believe passionately in nothing. Life is utterly
futile, merely a spasm of brutality meaning absolutely nothing. Your life, my life, is utterly and completely pointless. Sorry to break it to you. But rather than making us depressed, it frees us to overact appallingly and bring drama, richness and texture into existence. A man should always be impeccably dressed for the firing squad you know. And give the order himself...

G: And finally... do you like animals at all?

S: Hate them all. I have enough dumb friends without getting a pet. Basically, animals should be delicious and fit well.

THE VAMPIRE AT HIS OWN VEINS

Ennui woke me and with a yawn I swallowed the dawn. From the abyss of sleep to the abyss of life. From nightmares to daymares.

I rise and paint myself a face. Like the flowers one lays on graves so I lay on my life. I am the wound and the knife. I am the shadow and the strife.

I descend into the city. My hunger is an insatiable vampire coveting this great city as its feeding place. The twisting, swarming streets of Soho, snaking their way like arteries and veins through a body are where I feed The Great Need.

Like a suicide I shall open these veins to freedom. I love you horrible life. I love you horrible city; your bloody fingers point to heaven. Everything you have rejected, everything you have lost, everything you have scorned and broken I shall covet and collect.

I shall extract beauty from evil and evil from beauty. To show that virtue and sin exist in everything. For in Soho every human flaw, from a single wound to the corrupt heart has been sealed in the amber of artifice. From the glitter to the litter. From the whore to the poor; the harlots and the hunted have pleasures of their own to give, the vulgar herd can never understand. I shall wander across the moving shadows of this great city in search of pity.

The anonymous energy of this great city sweeps people apart, violating love and permanent relationships. And what is love but a crime? A crime which needs an accomplice. An accomplice who can be shared, and bought and sold.

I opened the door and stood before the poor stark flesh upon the bed. The room was malevolent. Clad with a cold and sinister beauty. The bed, stripped of sheets and covers, the striped mattress as naked as a corpse. The room is like a morgue in which love is laid out.

There are some women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills me only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze. Full of brilliant and violent colour; blinking her useless eyelids at nothingness. Her voice was the death rattle of a woman who had been forgotten by the world. She gave me her skeletal kiss and I could smell the graveyard stench of her breath.

I had come to commit a crime. And I wanted her to save me. Save me like a tourniquet. And like the rising dead she struggled upwards and I wanted her to bleed in her struggles. To hear her moans as the red flesh was tattered away from the white bones. But I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous silence came upon me. I heard her voice echoing down the centuries. I saw her eyes drowning with lies. And I felt like an insect. I was dying though my body still clung to me.

I fucked her; gulfs of silence between each stroke. I laid her open like a girl. And she opened vaster and vaster every second, an incredible wound of nothingness, into which I was falling. And then through the thick swathings of darkness, first the dull slaps of flesh on flesh and then hatred like a flash of lightning that broke through the gloom and glittered.

I enfolded myself in the cloak of evil and put my fate into Satan’s hands. I was seized with the poetry of cruelty as we came together in our hideous coupling, flailing our eight limbs like some giant suppurating insect. Blood mingles with sperm and sperm with blood. She stared skywards like a dead woman on a battlefield trying to guard in herself her own particular wound. But to no avail. Her savage eyes betrayed the scene of carnage. And the more she resisted the more I insisted. With my crown of birds of prey I had come here to make her bleed for me and bleed for me she would. Oceans and oceans until with a graveyard howl she cried “No more!”

And then it was my turn. I knelt as if to pray and let this carrion crow lacerate my flesh; I wanted her to destroy me and as she flogged me she made my existence into something exceptional, hideous, poetic. My wounds blossomed like flowers.

I looked at her; corpse yellow - a heap of entrails. Oh my little lover how I hate you. Cover up your ugly udders with sad rags.

Once left, she torments and follows me. I walk through the veins, down which flows all the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history. The woeful roads that stretch towards the sad, dark heart of the city. The city in its dusks and dawns that change more quickly than the human heart.

I hate you horrible life. I hate you horrible city.

The sun sinks in its own blood. I looked at my watch. It was 5.00pm. Rush hour. I snaked my way home and shot up in my room. Why am I so beautiful but so obsessed with doom?

The careless, not to say impatient way in which I bear the burden of life does leave a vague hope in me that I might loose or cast it away at any moment. But it is not to be. I overdose and wake up five hours later with the needle still in my arm. I stand firm in my refusal to remain conscious during a crisis. I cannot die. I am dead already.

ROME REGENCY HOME

“I love the word decadence” gushed Verlaine, “all gleaming with crimson.” The word mimics the symptoms of disease and is made up of a mixture of carnal spirit, melancholy flesh, and all the violent splendours of the Byzantine Empire, loved as an emblem by the French decadent dandies of whom Verlaine, Baudelaire and Rimbaud were the clearest sickly voices.

Not believing in the future is the essential mark of the decadent dandy. When you don’t believe in that future, particularly if you don’t have a god to punish you if you step out of line or reward you with heavenly bliss when your otherwise pointless life is over, what do you do? You know that the religious promise of immortality is a pure illusion, fit for children. What can you do? You can decide that the only real power that you have in this life is over your own body, so why not drink and drug it to death? After all, as all self-respecting dandies know, suicides are the aristocrats of death.

In the dandy’s spiritual home all roads lead to Rome. Monstrous emperors devising exquisite new cruelties or else consumed by awful boredom. The excesses of individual behaviour which, in Christian times, would be labelled as the sins of a avarice and voluptuousness. Tiberius wanted to see little girls strangled but he had respect for the religious laws against the strangulation of virgins. So he ordered the executioners to fuck them before they were throttled. Nero castrated his boy Sporus to turn him into a girl, and solemnly, magnificently married him. Then he went off to the circus, where he dressed up in the skins of wild animals and had himself locked into a cage, from which he was released to attack the genitalia of men and women tied to stakes.

In the Roman Arena the games became more and more depraved, with women, children, dwarfs and even the disabled being pitted against each other. Once, when there was a shortage of suitable victims, Caligula ordered a section of the crowd to be thrown to the animals. Occasionally live sex shows were staged. Women convicted of sexual offences were raped to death by bulls after being smeared with the secretions emitted by cows when on heat. Public burning to death provided the floodlights for matches after dark.

If a slave killed himself, or attempted to within six months of his purchase he could be returned alive or dead to his old master and the deal was declared invalid. In this glorious age people would offer themselves for execution to amuse the public at five minae (about £150), the money to be paid to their heirs; the market was so competitive that the candidates would offer to be beaten to death rather than beheaded, since that was a shorter torture, more painful and so more spectacular.

Later, in the Regency period, there was an era marked by extravagance of behaviour and personality, one which swung betweens extremes of elegance and refinement and depths of sodden brutality. An age of extravagance and exoticism, when the ruling class, blazed, cracked and fizzed in a torrid Indian summer before the dismal winter of democracy descended. An age marked by great eccentricities, a devil may care individuality, homosexuality, and criminality. Gothic fiction, rakes, strumpets, gamblers, murderers, drunkards and artists. Gentleman are having their shoe laces ironed while half naked children are sweeping their chimneys. Wilberforce is denouncing the slave trade while Beau Brummell is denouncing with equal gravity an imperfectly tied cravat. HA! What about that?

It is no longer possible to be exotic.

What has happened to us? Whatever happened to the good old days when children worked in factories?

Look at our shitty little lives.We give people a box in the suburbs ; it's called a house. Every night we sit in it starring at another box ; it's called a television. In the morning we run off to work in another box ; it's called an office, we return from one box to the other box in another box on wheel ; it's called a car. Finally we go off in another box forever ; it's called a coffin.

Fuck that baby. Not me. If I had a throne, you could call it home. And what is a home but a comfortably padded lunatic asylum?

I ain’t no loony. Do I believe in capital punishment? Not since it ceased to be a public occasion. Force is all that maters. War is sacred. Hanging is excellent. We don’t need too much knowledge. Build more prisons and fewer schools. Knock down the hospitals and old people’s homes. Give me your fucking money. And suck my fucking cock while your at it.

THE DANDY IS DIVINE

When I was young I thought the recipe for happiness was devastating good looks, a blazing talent and a colossal income. I was right. As for love? The rich think that the most important thing in life is love. The poor know it is money. It is the only thing poor people do know. Given that money is the root of all evil, they should be very virtuous. But they’re not. No, they just moan, groan and drone, looking for a loan. Why don’t they just get rid of such luxuries as food, clothing and shelter, and give us all some peace? Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with the necessities.

Fancy a fuck?

7 Meard Street. Black Bell. And bring a friend.

SELF LOVE SEEMS SO OFTEN UNREQUITED. NOT IN MY CASE

Girlfriends are not necessarily the people that you like best. They are merely the people that got there first. (Join the queue bitch). But if I had gone to the Fortnum and Mason’s of love affairs I would have actually chosen her. Quite alot of the other skulls I’ve knobbed I would have missed. But then as you well know my dear readers, I have never shopped in Woolworth's.   

She was a Super Model. My Super Model. With her super muddle. Who was she? Christina Estrada cannot be named for legal reasons. She was class in a special way. I was déclassé on Class A. Her natural mode of transport was Concorde - the carriage of a king. My natural mode of transport was ambulance - the carriage of a queen. She had a soft spot for me ( in the head ). I had a hard spot for her. She was thin and I was holy. Diety with deity. We were bejewelled. The world bedazzled.

She was pretty good looking for a super model. She had that air of great quality about her. A face of marvellous beauty which one sees rarely in the world, perfect in its hardened classicality - a Greek face translated into American. What when drunk one sees in other women I saw in her sober. Clearly If you get simple beauty and nothing else you get about the best thing God invents. Most men when they cannot catch a Golden Eagle settle for a tinned chicken. But this eagle took me like a rabbit.

Have you ever knobbed a super model dearies? No I’m sure you haven’t. Let me tell you it’s pretty odd. What we all want is an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. Stripped naked when you see perfection staring back at you there’s not much you can improve upon. It is a bit like looking in the mirror. For me not you.

I was amazed that she would fuck me. Hadn’t she read about me for Satan's sake? I am someone who has raised living to a new low. I have spent my life sitting in a sewer and adding to it. She on the other hand was about as wild as a pension plan. Banging on about Yoga, vegetarianism, abstinence and other diseases of the soul. There is, after all, a certain spiritual calm that comes from having money in the bank.

And girl did $he like money. I didn’t think she would fornicate with anyone whose salary was inferior to her own. Her tiny piggy eyes lit up alternatively by greed and the sound of her own voice. Generally I don’t care what comes out of a woman’s mouth as long as I can come in it. But this was too much even for me. Her conversation was the nearest thing to eternal life that we’ll ever see on this planet. She dived into a sentence and you never saw the cunt again. Indeed, silence was the only golden thing that she wasn’t interested in.

The one tenth of the personality that breaks the surface and the nine tenths that lie, like an iceberg waiting, quietly and ominously below. Do we kill love with a sword or a kiss, by violence or cowardice?  If treachery is inseparable from faith then I was hanging by a thread and the clock was ticking. Time was becoming visible - each stolen kiss grabbed like a thief in the night as I waited for the knife.

And come it did. I was in bed alone with the bone and the phone. It rang.

It was my Super Model. She was also in bed but she was not alone. She was with her Mother:

“Darling your on Television. Mummy and I think you look yummy.”
Me (desperately) :  “Oh Lord. What am I wearing?”
Super model : “Red suit. Black Shirt”

I knew it was going to be bad. I was being interviewed on a programme about whoring. I started talking very loudly down the phone to try and distract her. It was no good. I heard myself down the line saying :

“I’ve slept with over a thousand prostitutes...... I wish I was more ashamed“

Two days later a story appeared in the paper about us going out together. It said that my super model had previously been with a billionaire but was now with “Sewer Life” Horsley. It said that her last man owned South Africa and had bought her a diamond so large it had to be kept in a bank vault with an armed guard. Would I, the interviewer asked, be buying her a rock?  “What. Of crack?” I replied.

I can’t imagine why but I was dumped for another billionaire. If I am rejected without equivocation, I try to accept the fact good naturedly. Your Mother’s a prostitute and I defecate on the corpse of all your past ancestors. Oh of course no woman marries for money : they are all clever enough, before marrying a billionaire, to fall in love with him first. And yes everyone says that looks don’t matter, age doesn’t matter, money doesn’t matter. But I never met a girl yet who has fallen in love with an ugly old man who’s broke.

Your lucky if you like the girl your in love with. But perhaps I am being too hard. We do not criticise a shark whose whole existence is based around devouring and occasionally reproducing - I mean they’ve got no other hobbies.  Let’s face it Romance without finance is no good.

Women’s talent generally resembles the wings of a chicken. It enables them to run, though not to soar. I have always treated women as nannies, grannies and fannies (did I forget trannies)? but my super model was special.

But it had to end. I am in love with myself. By adoring her I was being unfaithful. And worse than this by being monogamous I was making one woman happy but all the other women in the world unhappy. What right do I have to do that?

The arms that close most tenderly around you are still a chain. And happily my darling readers I have lost my chains and I am  wearing again my crown.  I am free forever from the damp, dark prison of eternal love. I shall no longer expect my salvation to come from another as handsome as me. Oh well. I thought I was in love. But it turned out to be benign.

SEBASTIAN IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT UNEMPLOYED.

I just re read the column I was fired from The Observer for and it made me giggle.  I was their sex columnist  for all of  four months. I was an agony aunt - putting people into their misery.  A question came in saying “In my last relationship I developed a passion for anal sex. I enjoy sex with my new boyfriend, but he shows no signs of “going there”. How do I broach this romantically?”

I answered :

“First, my dear, I wish to make clear that I am an expert on anal sex by virtue of my inexperience. While I have buggered women and been buggered by them; been buggered by men and buggered them, used cocks, dildos and cucumbers and  once when tipsy realised that I wasn’t fucking a woman from behind but a transvestite up the arse - I haven’t really experimented.

The anus is quite a delicate subject for both sexes. We all spend out lives denying we have one. Women use the lavatory? For the Byrons among us, this discovery is a fate worse than death. The ultimate horror is that the ethereal, the beautiful and the divine are inextricably linked to basic animal functions. In one of Mr Swift’s poems, a young man explains the grotesque contradiction that is tearing him apart :

“Nor wonder how I lost my wits;
Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!”

It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.

That love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement is not our fault. As you know human beings respond to almost any erotic stimulus. It was only while people still felt that God was watching them that they directed their impulses exclusively towards certain parts of certain people. In everybody the anus is at least as capable of sexual excitement as the lips.

It is time for you to educate your man. Here’s what to do. Arrange a dinner at a restaurant riddled with standards of living. Wear a black dress and paint your lips vermilion. After a few glasses of wine tell him you have a surprise for him. Then get this magazine out. There. Now start reading this column to him. Are you doing that? Good. Give him a wink. Blow him a kiss.

See. Wasn’t that easy? Is he smiling or has he legged it? I see him laughing. You are home and dry. If you want your man to take you seriously you must make him laugh. Have fun both of you.”


Well, I thought that was quite a sweet answer. But apparently the Observer is a family newspaper. There I was extolling my passion for anal sex next door to the cookery column and the horoscopes. But it just gets better. It was published on Easter Sunday! You couldn’t make it up.

“We have never had as many complaints in the history of the Newspaper” said my editor - “and most of them are from the journalists. They seem to think you are a pervert”.

The complaints went like this : “I cannot believe that you have found it fit to print this article, indeed even to have started this series,' one man wrote. 'Let me assure you, as a parent this is in very bad taste. My teenage daughter enjoys your magazine but read this article and found it very distasteful. You owe her an apology.'

Another wrote that the magazine that week had a 'family-friendly' cover and so she had encouraged her three daughters - all under 12 - to read it - a decision she was to bitterly regret.

God, don’t children get on your tits? There is an idea that children are innocent which is preserved almost at all costs. Of what are they innocent? Of duplicity? I haven’t found adults full of duplicity. Most people say they do, but I don’t find children particularly innocent because I don’t find grown-ups particularly devious. I don’t ever remember being “innocent,” or particularly surprised or shocked by anything at all.

For some bizarre reason I was in the country in a house full of children when the piece came out. Some ten year olds were reading it, I can’t remember why - probably because I gave it to them.

One of them came up to me and said : “Basti. What is annual sex?”
“That’s what you have when you are married darling." I replied.

Blimey. Children don’t speak the language very well do they?

Two weeks later I answered another question which summoned my death knell.

“My boyfriend loves oral sex. I really want to please him, but I’m embarrassed by my lack of experience. How on earth do I learn how to give a good blow job?”

I answered :

"Oral sex is a matter of taste. Does anyone really want to put someone’s penis in their mouth? To make love with excremental organs? That it is unseemly is not our fault. The fault lies with the manufacturer. God put the waterworks too close to the playground.

Obviously I have done it. You have to let them put it in otherwise they won't come back. But the real trouble I find with oral sex is that it smudges your lip stick. However, there are many men who prefer fellatio to fucking. They adore the mouth over the vagina. They try not to look at the fire while they are poking the mantelpiece.

So, first : dress up for it. The only way to atone for being a little under experienced is by being always absolutely over dressed. Next position yourself. In front of every great man, kneels a woman. In front of a mirror. Oral sex is as much about image as sensation and a man loves this image. Don’t flinch. An obedient girl commands her man.

Fellatio is as much about exclusion as inclusion. Firstly : don’t blow, don’t suck and obviously never inhale. Whatever you do, don’t use your teeth (but do make sure they stay in all night.) And always, always be up for it. So many women these days give very good headache.

The most important thing with fellatio is to get it over with as long as possible. Take your time. What men long for is unbearable pleasure indefinitely prolonged. As you feel him coming slow down and tease him. And when it comes to the money shot you must earn your keep. Do not listen to the weathermen. One swallow does make a girlfriend.

To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself. You never know how it will come out or how silly you will look. Don’t worry, go into the experience with your mouth open. All will be well.”

It was my last column. An editorial was published in the main paper the next week. “Sebastian Horsley - painter, diarist and pink-suited dandy, who confesses to being 'haunted by sexual ambiguity' - wrote graphically in his characteristically colourful style of being 'an expert' in the subject of anal sex. Then, as if to add insult to injury, last week the column went into detail about oral sex. There was a serious failure of editorial judgment here. The column has been dropped.”

Well, if they hadn’t wanted me to mention bottoms, why had they supplied me with a question about buggery? And if they hadn’t wanted me to mention sucking cocks, why had they supplied me with a question about cock sucking?  I ask you!

Anyway, I was glad to be fired. I hated working for a liberal-minded, feminist-flag-waving, socially-embracing set of closed minded prigs who would have happily shot anyone who dared disagree with their all-inclusive opinions.

Besides, I didn’t want to be a journalist. Journalism is seen as a disgraceful trade. The confession that it is your chosen profession is received as though you had said “I’m in burglary” or “I’m in paedophilia.”

The firing was so stylish. You see, living’s fine, but the way you die often defines you for ever. It is not enough to know how to make a dazzling entry : you need to know how to vacate the stage with the same panache.

Mission accomplished.

I AM LIKE A COMPUTER. I HAVE A SIX INCH HARD DRIVE BUT NO MEMORY.

Sorry my darlings I have not been in touch. I was downloading kiddie porn and my computer got a virus. So I went off to the brothel to lose my penis to a whore with disease. I guess I should have just fucked the computer and cut out the middle man? Is Ram Disk an installation procedure?

MY SYRINGE BINGE

I celebrated my two year clean birthday last week. My sponsor said to me : “Do something nice for yourself Sebastian. Go for a walk in the park, look at the trees and the birds, have a massage, treat yourself to something nice.”

So I did. I took delivery of 10 Rocket metal and glass syringes.

I have put them all on my mantelpiece and they look so beautiful. They are glistening and glittering and shinning away to themselves. I am entranced by the lovely mechanical slide; the clean, cold precision, the satisfying symmetry. The weight feels so right. They are so permanent and blank and true. To me, they are a symbol of the anaesthesia of pain engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.

Ostensibly these syringes are for artworks I am making for my upcoming show “Hookers, Dealers, Tailors” but they are so much more than that.

They comfort me. I can continue to function efficiently and even happily provided I know I have my own, specially chosen means of escape always ready : a hidden syringe under my bed and a loaded gun beside it.

Of course, I am not really going to use them. I am no longer a practising drug addict. No, I am perfect.

You see, I gnawed my leg off, got out of the trap and hobbled to freedom. You can only give things up once they start to let you down. I gave up drugs when the pleasure and the pain became simultaneous and I might as well have been shooting up my own tears.

In the old days it was different. When the syringe went into my arm. When the nails went through my hands. When the room emptied. Blood. Sin. Then I came in. And I liked that. Suit up, shoot up, shut up - that was my motto. And what about you my darlings? Would you bear the body of St Sebastian, stigmata of his needle wounds glowing away with a soft blue flame?

Most recovering addicts have found God - or at least a publisher. What about me? I have spent my life scared of the light. In darkness and in night I found delight. But now I want something different. I would like success and money if that’s alright with you. Success is like a shot of heroin. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to continue to put the needle in your arm. As for God? From the needle in the arm to the bible under it? As The Bible says, it is easier for a rich man to get through the eye of a needle than for a camel to get into heaven. What about a Horsley?

Well, we shall see. The proofs are out and I wonder what effect they are having. The first response I got was from Cosmo Landesman the ex husband of Julie Burchill. “Got your book yesterday. My wife read it in one sitting last night. She said it made her feel physically sick and she eventually threw up.”

Well I say. High praise indeed. If someone vomits reading Dandy In The Underworld it’s like getting a standing ovation.

I wonder what effect it will have on others? I’ve no idea. Reading “Mein Kampf” does not make a fascist. Reading The Bible does not make a Christian. Reading Das Kapital does not make a Marxist. Reading Dandy in the Underworld does not make a knob-head.

But don’t say I didn’t try ...