DAY FOUR (part one): DISASTER #2


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March 30th 2008
Published: March 30th 2008
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After returning to my room without my camera I started to get the symptoms of a cold. Then my eye, which had been itching all afternoon, started to swell. The eyeball itself was developing a film of transparent mucus, and it got quite uncomfortable, like having about a half teaspoonful of raw egg white on your eyeball. I went back to the reception and asked to see the locum. The what? The doctor? They have no in house doctor here; I guess when you only have about 5000 guests spread over three interlocked hotels, then you’re most unlikely to see any cases of upset stomach or sunstroke. JUST in case, the do have a procedure: it involves writing the name of a local hospital on a piece of paper. I returned to my room and went to bed. This morning, as I type this, the swelling has receded and I am living off bananas and fruit juice in an attempt to get better. Tonight is the Huey Lewis concert, and I don’t want to miss it.

Being holed up in my room feeling sorry for myself, I was glad that I had brought my copy of Encyclopedia Acephalica, a compendium of the writings of the Acéphale secret society members. I looked through the shots of the hotel I had taken yesterday and read some of the entries in the ‘Critical Dictionary’...

‘Architecture is the expression of the true nature of societies’ it says. Society is currently (they argue) one of authoritative command and prohibition, and architecture is the most forceful expression of this. ‘Great monuments rise up to oppose all disquiet and dissent, cathedrals, palaces...’ Great monuments ‘speak to and impose silence on the crowds.’ Indeed, monuments inspire good social behavior.

Acéphale saw architecture as a case of how the true human spirit is constrained, limited, prohibited from its most natural actions and impulses. The fervently anti-Christian tone of Acéphale’s ideas is perhaps not quite so cutting to our own sensibilities; the church and its rites, priests and monuments are not so dominant in our lives as they perhaps were seventy or eight years ago. But consumerism and its own great monuments have successfully come to supplant the church. And a massive Bahamian hotel, strewn with franchised eating outlets, and with a great big casino at its heart, is a pretty good expression of the true nature of our society.

‘Therefore, an attack on architecture, whose monumental productions now truly dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing admiration and wonder, order and constraint, is necessarily an attack on man.’ They go on to cite abstract painting as offering an alternative to this, as opening up a path ‘towards bestial monstrosity, as if there were no other way of escaping the architectural straightjacket.’

‘Bestial monstrosity’, in case you were wondering, is a positive term to Georges Batailles and his friends, it is true feeling, true expression. But here’s a thing. If you wanted to hide something, to make a symbolic act of withdrawal, of becoming headless, what better place than the epicenter of architectural conformism, a massive modern hotel, those ‘great monuments rise up to oppose all disquiet and dissent, cathedrals, palaces...’ that ‘speak to and impose silence on the crowds’ and inspire good social behavior. Together with airports and shopping malls, the modern hotel is everything that Batailles et al hated about modernity.

Then a second idea occurs to me. If you wanted to secrete your secret society somewhere poignant, to add a touch of irony to its location, the Bahamas is a pretty good choice. This is the playground of American conformism, of the rich, of predictability and self-constrained action. There’s even something rather stereotypical of registering your offshore company in the Bahamas, rather than in Liechtenstein or Honduras, for example. If the secret society Acéphale is here, in the guise of Headless Ltd, in whatever guise, I think it would be a brilliant choice of location.

The only question is, why is it here? It would be pretty cool to find that out.


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31st March 2008

Camera!
Hey. your camera is in the reception. enjoyed your little story of the eye, george! Beth-K

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