It seems to happen anytime a large group of Westerners are away from home. When I arrived at U. Berkeley at the age of 17, I drifted, with a mixture of fear and curiosity, into the post-punk world. I only caught the tail end of that world-I came too late, and never actually entered into its orbit. I still remember, with shame, that bullwhip I bought from a black man in North Oakland.
I hung it up on my wall to impress the bleach-faced punks, though I never used it. Once, Mitzy, a famous local dominatrix, saw my bullwhip and pulled it down. She asked me to show her how I use it; while awkwardly snapping it in the air, I accidentally lashed my face and forearms, yelping out loud with each strike.
It got a good laugh out of Mitzy, a nice pat on my head. I threw it away, and vowed never to fake something like that again. I realized this in Prague back in I arrived there with a single goal: to make money, buy a small rural castle, then hire a team of young Slovak servants whom my girlfriend Sarka would train and discipline according to her whim.
The problem nowadays is that decadence has lost its danger. By its very definition, decadence cannot be exciting unless it is a. It has become watered down. Decadence has been corrupted by the masses. Russians who dare tend to devour bodies and drugs with the same now-or-never attitude that they have towards a lot of things in life. Not like the French, or even Americans, who constantly battle the demons of ennui.
Wanna get abused? Step out into the street; get a girlfriend or boyfriend; go to the local produkty store. Wanna do the abusing? Hire a secretary; get into a relationship; hop in a car and run down the fleeing masses. So why are so many eXpats then trying to pass themselves off as modern-day libertines? Is it the stress, the freedom to act like a monster in an alien environment, or even the fault of this newspaper?
