Heterotopia is upstairs, the first and second floors are suspended on carbon fibre chains to enable better sound proofing. It’s so beautiful that it almost corresponds to a heaven on earth. Its club Heterotopia. Though whether its upstairs, in a basement or hidden in a secret subspace doesn’t matter. He has the feeling that if he slips on the stairs he could fall through risers into superspace. Neon letters light the entrance into Heterotopia , long strips of blue, orange and green. The blue is gentle and inviting, the orange is the color of crocosmia, the green of summer flowers foliage. They are the colors of dreams and memories, it is not the colors of heaven or of the hot southern states. There is a staircase that leads up to Heterotopia , shiny and worn by the feet of pilgrims, on either side handrails – mirrors and posters of earlier performers hang on the walls. As he rises one stair at a time the atmosphere. of smoke, drugs and alcohol becomes denser. Soon it will be early morning and dreams, memories.
as he reaches the landing with the midnight bar, the french doors open onto the balcony, people crowded onto the balcony. Glasses of expensive beer, wine and korean soju, the last memories of the korean band that played on sunday. Its nearly midnight and this bar will close soon, people will pass through the doors into the suspended Heterotopia . Understandings of time will fade and they will lose their bearings, Soho and the sky scrapers with their billboards and giant TV screens vanishing. The noise of traffic and footsteps on the busy streets fades. On entering the main room he was confronted with a landscape of things, subjects and objects – of something and mostly nothing which he had no easy means of grasping. An entanglement of things, non-things and nothings which evaded every category, every concept, every instrument he had mastered over the years. He could not name them, he could not even count them. From a phenomenological perspective this is a very strange sort of encounter. And there is the band too the left of the entrance, at the highest level, a dance floor to the right in front of them. Piano, drums, saxophone, piccolo trumpet and turntables. The piano is leading, he is sitting to the left of the stage facing the other musicians, half watching them as he plays. They are playing elements of a thirty year back catalogue. The band are the most sober people here, water, some soft drink. They are keeping track of time and geo-philosophy of place. They, he thinks, don’t belong in Heterotopia as he does. They are working guests. Yet their presence was beyond doubt, and even grew stronger as his bewilderment and despair grew. He encounters this mass of things, this chaos of bits and other things strewn about the floor yet don’t they have meaning and any categorizations which is ordinarily present in our. fetishism. They are there he is a subject to these objects, but it’s as if the relation is a non-relation. It is an encounter with the order of things, with their existence apart from humans. He thinks that the things were doing just fine without us. He shares his table with a group of women who have come on from their office. No no, its nice, my friends couldn’t come at the last moment… sorry, I know, too much information…
He is drinking honey vodka. Good quality polish vodka infused with the honey of polish forest bees. Sometimes it tastes like vodka, sometimes like the utopia of the woods. Here its 5 for a short… On the dance floor there are people who cannot imagine not moving to the fluid noises after midnight. A multicultural mass, dark eyes to light eyes, with make-up and without, with bodies and without – they are angelic as suits a heterotopia . Nobody knows who they are, even themselves, but how they dance and dance. They talk and talk, she is drinking soju, she is reminiscing about Seoul during the monsoon. He asks her about the Han river. She talks about a bench she sat on by the river in January. He talks and hopes for a future that isn’t as painful as the recent past. She talks about being a secretary for a director who failed in his bid to become CEO, he is in Cuba she says learning to dance the salsa…
The light changes. The first set ends, silence and the sound of people heading for the bar. The lighting changes to the dark grey-green of suburban districts, fading into green and then led white. Faces and bodies illuminated by the ultra violet. Their drinks change color they speak hopefully about things. Both hoping that the other likes them. A new piano player is playing Cuban son during the interval, Heterotopia draws a breath. Things are photographed, documented, surveilled. A secret policeman surveys the room. They speak of running, together. There is something almost folkish, a folk-philosophy about their situation. The piano is covering the room with a reddish glow. Its the early morning moment announcing the end of the world, whilst the policeman hopes. Everyone in the Heterotopia knows they are lost, melancholic for that time when they thought they might be free or rich. They talk and talk, trying to avoid melancholia. Perhaps they, being together are incapable of being sad, so nice to just talk they think. Before the set begins they begin to leave together. New people are ascending the stairs as they leave. An angel arrives, tall and thin, dressed in a black dress, her delicate face not hiding the harshness beneath. Menacing. It is extraordinary he thinks how this woman can descend the stairs so delicately in her black leather ankle boots after drinking so much soju…
(For CR, all errors are deliberate )
Tags: everyday practices Everyday Places fiction life in the west
