The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

In “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” (1945), on the roads across America, Henry Miller assaults modernity:

"This world which is in the making fills me with dread... It is a world suited for mono­maniacs obsessed with the idea of progress - but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams, or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a crimi­nal."

Miller as primitive man, as stranger in a strange land: "We need their paper boxes, their but­tons, their synthetic furs, their rubber goods, their hosiery, their plastic this and that. We need the banker, his genius for taking our money and mak­ing himself rich. The insurance man, his policies, his talk of security, of divi­dends - we need him too. Do we? I don't see that we need any of these vultures."

All the more true in our postmodern high-tech world?…

Spirit

"I'm a religious man but not a religionist. Let's put it very simply. When we say that "man does not live by bread alone," that's a symbolic statement tersely put. What it means is that it isn't his success in the struggle for life-his getting bread, getting security, protecting wife and children-that sustains and sup­ports him. It's something you can't put your finger on; it's spirit. You can't name it, can't define it. It's greater than everything else; it includes everything. I think I sense it when I come in contact with it. I think you're aware of it when you talk to people. There are those of poor spirit and those of Great Spirit. None are without it, but the flame flickers pretty low in some cases. The majority of people seem to be nothing but a little flickering flame. You know that when you match them against an individual who is all fire, all radiance. Those in whom the flame of the spirit runs high are extraordinary examples of human beings". (Henry Miller)

Domes of Darkness & Psychedelia

“... I recognize here the old power of authentic architecture, which is conjointly to enhance the moving, dancing bodies and to animate the spaces and the structures”. (Roland Barthes)

The perfect club, the Xanadu of the flowing arc of life: “the community of those who have no community.” (Georges Bataille) is always at hand for the philanthropic benefactors of humankind, for those who believe in Mauss/Bataille’s economics of the gift, and Keynesian economics...

Here “At Le Palace” as Roland Barthes puts it: “...light occupies a deep space, within which it comes alive and performs like an actor; an intelligent laser...like an exhibitor of abstract sculptures, produces enigmatic traces, with sudden mutations: circles, rectangles, ellipses, tracks, cables, galaxies, fringes....the appearance of a new art, in its material (a mobile light) and in its practice; for this is actually a public art, in that it is achieved among the public and not in front of it, and a total art (the old Greek and Wagnerian dream), where scintillation, music, and desire unite”.

“Le Palace is not a boîte, a "box," as we French call a night-club: it collects in an original site pleasures ordinarily dis­persed: that of the theatre as an edifice lovingly preserved, the pleasure of what is seen; the excitement of the Modern, the exploration of new visual sensations, due to new tech­nologies; the delight of the dance, the charm of possible meetings. All this combined creates something very old, which is called la Fête and which is quite different from Amusement or Distraction: a whole apparatus of sensations destined to make people happy, for the interval of a night. What is new is this impression of synthesis, of totality, of complexity: I am in a place sufficient unto itself. It is by this supplement that Le Palace is not a simple enterprise but a work and that those who conceived it may regard themselves with good reason as artists...” (Roland Barthes).

The material could be apprehended as a paradoxical combination of flowing colored glass and transparent steel immersed in a dual spherical structure of geodesic design.

In such an aesthetic engineered sphere, Qualias are impersonal and independent of the individuals who feel them. A passive architectural creation founds the active genesis of psychic clubbing…

Each psychic or “qualic” element of each participant is mirrored in the glass panes of the spherical shape of the club. Each about to be individuated Qualia is reflected in the architectural moving features of the whole.

Atmospheric spaces of multi-screen visuals synchronized to all the individuated Qualias and body forms that could arise from the night: a psychic melting pot enriched with colors and sounds of sinuous fragrances from the orient, from the bejeweled sun of the warm south and from the crisp outlines of the ruins of the misty north.

A psychic ecosystem emerges in which a "somatic solidarity" of pre-symbolic qualities of involvement is encouraged without transcendental designs. Immanent and self-organizing…

Architecture as psychic space, a space attuned to the qualitative (durational) flowing of time. Architecture as psychic enactment and artment…

A multi­dimensional sensualist experience of any age group emerges, in which beautiful and ineffable angels, beat their luminous wings in the vortexes of a bounded infinity.

The tunnel entrance bifurcates into two areas of equal measure of spherical perfection. One half of the dome is dedicated to the rumbling base of Gothic darkness, the other to the thudding rainbow light of Trance. An atmosphere is created in which all the virtual and semi virtual shades of black and the spectrum colors of rainbow are encouraged to emerge into sensorial existence.

Two worlds, two universes in one pleasure dome of honeycomb ecstasy. Darkness prevails and psychedelia exhales. One entrance, two panes, two pleasure domes.

In the gothic pane of the hexagonal featured sphere, the dome morphs to the Qualias of base darkness. While the Qualias the Trance sphere chant the ecstasy of intoxicated bodies bound to the rhythmic fascinations of synthetic blips and beats.

Gothic Qualias, Features and forms:

Tableaux vivants of illuminated “delectatio morose”:

Sparkling eyes and slender bodies of bounded silhouettes inform auras of psychic intensities.

Here all seductiveness is interwoven with the most secret fe/male fantasies, the most unpronounceable ones.

Strengths of black and white sensualities emerge from the contrast between an innocence of childlike faces and eyes that light up with sudden lust …

Abandoned scenes of industrial sites in which the starkness of the location ecstatically sets off all female vulnerability. The derelict factory filled with smooth, ivory squirming flesh in the quintessential illuminations of the dark lights above.

The thrills of being taken to the edge of self that melts and turns over into ecstasy. The needs to increase gradually the complex of pain and pleasure until a threshold is reached in which the gradual scale of the beautiful is transformed into a sublime difference of kind, a qualitative leap of intensity which bears no semblance of resemblance with what went before.

Secret locations in and around the dome are sacredly reserved to the chained ecstasies of nubile heroines in search of sexual salvation and aesthetic redemption. Here, innumerable Stories of O in dark alcoves exhale to the pain scales of sadomasochistic pleasures…

Trance Qualias, Features and forms of psychedelia:

...eyes with luminous vivacity morphing in tune with the warm atmospheres of electric magnitudes…

Flowered sensations abound…

Feline movements of fauvist lineage, something almost oriental about the languid and yet, energetic manners…

Molten lava of bodies in Trance of emerged ecstasy throbbing with coloured beams to the dancing sil­houettes crisscrossed with light features of diachronic space...

Erospheres of libidinal intensities inflame geometrical structures...

...“At this moment, the softness of nudity (the birth of legs or breasts) touched the infinite”. (Georges Bataille)…

Allegro ma non troppo...

Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Brahms, Vivaldi, and Bartok to name but a few in her classical repertoire. The contrast could not have been more extreme. By day, the aristocratic hushed marble of the conservatoire of Paris, by night, the hazy condom aluminium ridden floors of the “bas fonds” of the Montmartre gothic scene - why does she need the beats of a formless code? By day, perfecting her classical sounds on scales of divine grace and pure light, by night, unwinding her daily scales in dark alcoves of languid exuberance - why does she line up the white lines on broken plated mirrors?

The classical form, as opposed to the bubble gum Pop “form”, is a ruthless master and urges a sadomasochistic discipline far beyond the Marilyn Manson frame of reference. One is touched by a sonic perfection that few survive. Very few classical femmes survive beyond a mere playing of a set-piece of “classical music” - why does she crave these red of silver bound nights? So aristocratically contained in her conservatoire, so soiled and boundless in her alcoves of sinking velvet and flowing white - why does she abide to the binding knots of silk and leather?

By day everything about her is classical: form, grace, light and clarity, all refined and combined. By night nothing classical remains, all discipline and form is sacrificed to the altar of excess.

...then...darkness prevails. Sunken eyes out of formless orbs accentuate her senses, enticing others to erotic deliriums - why does she crave the pain of pleasure thorns so much?

Here in the serpentine enclaves of Montmartre’ ultraviolet underworld female figures of a whiter shade of pale await their male affinities with silvery eyes: a sacrifice to the negative shadows of the unformed and the formless...

...those same hands of classical discipline and grace synchronised for piano and violin touch hidden scales of flesh so acutely libidinal that it is a crime to whisper more than words. She emerges from the semen pit as a flowing goddess of molten lava. Crystallised and mineralized, she spends hours upon hours washing it all away in bath fountains of steam and sparkling water to the surrounds of the techno beats sounding their throbbing hard drives above...in the pleasure domes...

She washes it all away until an immaculate conception is restored. Rejuvenated and restored as a dream within a dream, she is ready for the sunshine outside to greet her with all the classical form that the sun god Apollo can bestow - but for how long is this restorable? Excesses have way of leaving memory traces that eat you alive from within…

The female kind is anxiously traversed by outlandish desires, untold pulses, and ramblings of unfulfilled longings. The female unconscious is a liquid topology overflowing tropical surfaces. A topological surface distorted by luscious flower wishes, verdant plant pulses, and entangled vegetations of unspoken desires - for most of the female kind, mere translucent wishful images superimposing themselves, from time to time, over their cow grazing consciousness - for others a lifelong ecstasy quest of ever receding horizons…