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VANISHING POINT Caution: Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear!
Nostalgia born of the immesnsity of the Texan hills and the seirras of New Mexico: gliding down the freeway, smash hits on the Chrysler stereo, heat wave. Snapshots aren't enough. We'd need the whole film of the trip in real time, including the unbearable heat and the music. We'd have to replay it all from end to end at home in a darkened room, rediscover the magic of the freeways and the distance and the ice-cold alcohol in the desert and the speed and live it all again on the video at home in real time, not simply for the pleasure of remembering but becasue the fascination of senseless repetition is already present in the abstraction of the journey. The unfolding of the desert is indinitely close to the timelessness of film...
SAN ANTONIO
The Mexicans, become Chicanos, act as guides on the visit to El Alamo to laud the heroes of the American nation so valiantly massacred by their own ancestors. But hard as those ancestors fought, the division of labour won out in the end. Today it is their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who are there, on the same battlefield, to hymn the Americans who stole their lands. History is full of ruse and cunning. But so are the Mexicans who have crossed the border clandestinely to come and work here.
SALT LAKE CITY
Pompous Mormon symmetry. Everywhere marble: flawless, funereal (the Capitol, the organ in the Visitor Center). Yet a Los-Angeleic modernity, too- all the requisite gadgetry for a minimalist, extraterrestrial comfort. The Christ-topped dome (all the Christs here are copied from Thorwaldsen's and look like Bjorn Borg) straight out of Close Encounters: religion as special effects. In fact the whole city has the transparency and supernatural, otherworldly cleanness of a thing from outer space. A symmetrical, luminous, overpowering abstraction. At every intersection in the Tabernacle area - all marble and roses, and evangelical marketing - an electronic cuckoo-clock sigs out: such Puritan obsessiveness is astonishing in this heat, in the hear of the desert, alongside this leaden lake, its waters also hyperreal from sheer density of salt. And, beyond the lake, the Great Salt Lake Desert, where they had to invent the speed of prototype cars to cope with the absolute horizontality.... But the city itself is like a jewel, with its purity of air and its plungin urban vistas more breathtaking even than those of Los Angeles. What stunning brilliance, what modern ceracity these Mormons show, these rich banker, musicians, international genealogists, polygamists (the Empire State in New York has something of this same funereal Puritanism raised the the nth power). It is the capitalist, transexual pride of a people of mutants that gives the city its magic, equal opposite to that of Las Vegas, that great whore on the other side of the desert.
...
I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its European cottages.
I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. I even looked for it in the verticality of the great cities.
I knew all about this nuclear form, this future catastrophe when I was still in Paris, of course. But to understand it, you have to take to the road, to that travelling which achieves what Virilio calls the aestetics of desappearance.
Baudrillard, Jean. "America, Excerpts 2." Verso, London and New York. 1998. Available: http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/america.html
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