"You walk through the uninviting entrance into a completely dark foyer where you can vaguely perceive that there are a few people shuffling around. Then a flashlight lights up and you put your membership card in its beam. You’ve passed the first test. You go through the doors at the back of the lobby to the stairway. There are two official-looking if a bit stoned attendants there to check your membership number off in a ledger, write down the number of guests with you (you’re allowed two), and write out a bill—$19.00 for three. You then wait in line to go upstairs. This is the tensest part of the evening because you can hear the music from upstairs, and they’re usually playing one of your favorite songs, so you know you’ll miss dancing to it. At the top of the stairs, which are usually crowded with anxious, whispery guys, you pay your money and get your hand stamped with ink that glows under black light. Finally, you’re in, but still not ready for the dance floor. There’s another line at the coat check, which takes forever, because you have to decide there and then how much to take off, and there’s a feverish shuffling of necessities from the pockets of shed clothing to pockets in what you’re still wearing: joints of dust, poppers, inhaler, downs, cigarettes, matches, coke, coke spoon, ethyl chloride (if you’re a rag queen). If you’re smart, you do all of this at home, but that means making the difficult decisions before you’ve got the feel of the place.
"Place: Synthetic materials, industrial gloss, futuristic, spacey,
technologized surfaces and lighting. Enormous plants and
bowls of fruit appear as if technologically produced, having
no similarity to natural objects. Views through doorways to
the outside world are extremely disturbing. Views of reality
look unreal, nightmarish, tacky. Going outside is always a
shock, and it takes days to readjust to ugly reality.
People: Synthetically produced bodies using body-building
machines and protein supplements. Bodies moving en masse,
like cogs in a machine."
– Douglas Crimp
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