Act 1.

When we love or kill, we look at our own selves, at the tragic action of creation, at the juxtaposition of our exhausted superego and our lowest and more primitive longings. This ephemeral truly creative action is re-enacted by art and architecture as a badly dubbed copy filled with Apolline material pretensions that “mirror” the suffering of the action… that is seen either as impure, sick, evil, uncanny, sadist and unchristian [KILL]; or as good, pure, virginal, beautiful and Christian [LOVE]. A human creation can’t be reduced to politically and socially correct beauty because it is the children of an impulse, of an extreme, of proto-civil actions that go far beyond ethics… this tragic act can only be captured in those great rhetorical-lyrical scenes in which the passion and dialectic of the protagonist swelled into a broad and mighty torrent; in the end it is only graspable in the act of failure, and the acceptance of that failure, not as an moral torment, but as a beautiful enlightenment; not as a lucrative product but as a painful reward.

Act 2.

We do not only rejoice on the death of the morally pure individual, we as a mere audience that is chastise from the utter pleasure of heroic existence, cannibalize the few remains of this, once beautiful and eternal, body; now deformed to sublimation by rapid ingestion. This heroic existence, of the being that surpasses all human temptations by embodying them all, is the ultimate action of creation. Thus, the hero only exists within the realm of tragedy, within the sphere of suffering and slow death; within the body of self-created fictions. We have to fictionalize the extremes of our existence in order to materialize them; truth and falsity are irrelevant, because they are mere earthly concepts that are immovable due to of their inherently paradoxical attitudes.

What makes the being surpass himself, is the creation and consequent destruction of an element that overcomes him completely, an entity that goes far beyond of his mediocre human comprehension; the creation of what he yearns for and what he will so eagerly desire that at the end he will, not only kill for, but murder.

The need for a clear and tangible appreciation of the heroic being, forces the individual towards a crime of passion. He commits murder in order to finally face what he thought was unfaceable, in order to tame the mystical beauty of the hero he once romantically created, in order to become a civilized animal on steroids that knows without knowing and feels without feeling. He sees himself reflected on the Tragic Hero because the later is a re-enactment of the death by strangling of the unjudged mystical existence he, once belonged to; his punishment is to watch his cold-blooded crime on repeat without acknowledging the action as death, but as creation.

The Salton City is a dreamy real state development that was realized yet not materialized; it is plastic surgery gone wrong; it is after all a disaster (for some a blessing) that everyone tries to avoid, forget or accept, either by a delusional idealization of its past by living its present (this includes ecologists) or by looking away; by looking at what makes sense and will never deform into a monster; the emptiness as an anarchical playground.

There are different types of inhabitants in the City, ones are all year long locals; they love the idea of the Salton Sea, however they avoid its reality by freezing it in time. They have nothing else but this Sea, thus they take a either freakily positive or accepting position on the clearly dysfunctional and abnormal Salton Sea. This hyper-normal attitude can be caused by the lack of a critical comparison of the Salton Sea/City with other Seaside communities; by the acceptance of the horror due to the over-suffering of the situation and feeling helpless about it (this is a pessimism hidden by a thick layer of positivist dementia); or by living in a denial that unlinks the inhabitant from the actual reality of the situation.

However, there are other (temporary) citizens living in this failed real state conceived city, people that did not see the glory of the Salton See through their own eyes, but through the eyes of their relatives and the press. They stay in Salton City during the winter for six to eight months a year. Retired northern Americans and Canadians that came in searching for tranquillity, a warm climate, cheap land, house offers, and for the vastness of the landscape (they avoid the sea, in fact the boat has been substituted by the motorized vehicle). Those elderly couples, which I call Tapperwared snowbirds, due to their tendency of avoiding communal “schizophrenic-like” events, are able to critically understand the Salton City because they don’t habituate the area during the whole year; therefore they acknowledge its reality and choose to consciously avoid it.

There is a third type of inhabitant, the drifter and the RV settler. They are modern day nomads that don’t emotionally engage with the site they occupy; they are mere users of the space and of the taxing bubble. By drifting from site to site, those caravans avoid taxes and a site-specific dementia that would make them fall in love with a distorted image of the, now distant, average community once they belonged to. A drifter becoming a sedentary inhabitant in a Salton City-like community is the equivalent of finding your future wife in a transvestite brothel; it is sacrilege to the politically and socially correct and coherent suburban values.

“Once you get off the bus in Salton City it never gets back to pick you off”