Re: [-empyre-] following

[Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net>]

I've had the flu since Saturday, and I've wanted to comment on this all, but
I've been too sick to type. Now, I'm just addled on cough medicine and lack of
sleep.

For me, Baudrillard is a very mixed bag. Some of what he wrote was dead
brilliant. A lot of what he wrote wasn't. I'll miss him because I found him
inspiring, even though I rarely agreed with anything he put to paper.

The stuff he wrote that was grand had more to do with culture and media issues.
When he invoked notions of science, he was Waaaaaay off base. Sokal and
Bricmont spanked him pretty badly in "Fashionable Nonsense", and given what
they pointed at, deservedly so. However, even tough I sometimes fancy myself a
member of the reality based community, unlike most of his critics, I truly
don't consider him some kind of evil bete noir, as I do believe he did do a
number of things that were useful, even when they were clearly wrong. I'm too
foggy and headached and nose drippy and shivering to get into detail right now,
but given this is a kind of eulogistic exercise, I don't think it is necessary.
Not that I am unwilling to insult the dead - it's just not necessary right now.

What I liked especially about him was his abilities with analogies and his
imaginative ways of rethinking the obvious. Not that he was necessarily
correct, but that his ideas and connecxions could be interesting.

He reminds me of my friend's old Citroen DS21. A beautiful exotic car that
sported creative if equally often bizarre design decisions, sometimes elegant
and insightful, but also genuinely weird, and a mechanical disaster area that
required much more in repair and workaround than it was ever worth as a car.
Still, he kept it around, and bought another one, that I liken to Deleuze - a
citroen SM, that was very high performance, looked like it was going 140kpmh
when actually going nowhere in particular, but getting there in great style and
with no small insight into what it is to be an interesting car, even as it
would wobble about with its leaky hydraulics and high maintenance engine.  

Today, I think his daily vehicle is a Toyota Corolla... i  haven't talked to
him in 10 years... AFAIK, he still has the DS21, but it's usually not moving
and sits in his garage- it doesn't work anymore. The SM is long gone. 

Much like Baudrillard is for me. His works sit on a shelf, and sometimes I'll
read one or part of one, and find it inspiring, and then realise an hour has
flown by and he hasn't really told me anything new, or if it is new, it's
really not that original or even intelligible, and I put the book away and move
on to something more interesting.

(latest fascination: the criterion collection of Stan Brakhage's films. Now, if
Chris Marker would just get it together and release everything in NTSC DVD, I'd
be a Very Happy Camper...)

You might think from this that I hate Baudrillard. I don't really. Some of his
work I rather admire. Here is something that I found interesting and useful to
this day.

I believe it is in the book Simulations (I don't remember the page, but I
believe it was in the first third on the left hand side) he talked about the
Twin Towers as a reflection of the stability of the American political system,
as well as emblematic of its genuine nature: two nearly identical towers
dedicated to global trade.

I've taken this analogy further, and since 9/11 have extended it, and for this,
i thank Mr Baudrillard:

The twin towers not only symbolised the two party system, they symbolised the
American system itself. Politics" Yes - the stability of the duopoly, like the
nuclear marriage of the Soviet Union and America, rings in the forms of the
twin towers - faceless boxes of glass and steel.

But atop stood the superego broadcast tower, transmitting invisible control
over the the local citzens through televised distractions and entertainment:
the industry that Ate Art, and in simulating it, killed it. And below the Twin
Towers? A shopping mall filled with all the consumer items than make an
American Life worth living. And below the Shopping Mall? The Subway. and below
the subway? The PATH train to the industrial wastelands and suburban nightmares
of New Jersey. The Twin Towers stood astride a transportation nexus and a
luxury shopping mall. The American Political system of two capitalist parties
(one somewhat more evil than the other in its lack of entertainment value)
stands above transportation and consumption and both are fueled by a relentless
consumption of finite resources. Fanatical murderous jerks took down the Twin
Towers, and destroyed the mall. The train systems were rebuilt. And now, there
is nothing but an empty pit to serve as a backdrop for fear mongering photo ops
for the Bush junta. And the largest building in New York City?

The EMPIRE state building. A single needle topped unitary executive tower that
is painted red, white, and blue at night by high intensity lights in a
spectacle of resource consumption.

So, for THAT insight which took me interesting places, I want to thank Mr
Baudrillard. 


----

"The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling
reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. The
air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat
outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the
sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of
these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form,
inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a
crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and
stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion.
Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and
concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central
point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert - a privileged,
immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value,
and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to
seek the instantaneity of wealth." - Baudrillard on Las Vegas

"Las Vegas is a detestable hell hole that should be condemned. It is consuming
a vast amount of precious resources in a deeply depleted and fragile
environment. This profligate waste of energy, water, and material resources
permits the construction and maintenance of the glittering dream-like
atmosphere that allows people to feel excited in what is ostensibly one of the
most unsustainable and pointless cities on the planet. Without this mindless
and continuous waste, Las Vegas would disappear. As much as I despise Las
Vegas, I can sleep easily knowing it WILL disappear, and the world will be
better off without it. Las Vegas is a city whose heart was carved out of Steel
and Pitchblende on a table made of someone's life savings. I don't gamble, and
I find the thousands of retirees who piss away their children's inheritance on
one-armed bandits at the Casino to be just as pathetic and as much a part of
the problem as the greedy mafiosi who run those clip joints. I hope to live
long enough to see Las Vegas abandoned for the horrible idea that it was. Las
Vegas is not to be admired or analysed or theorised. It is to be abandoned,
forgotten, and then gradually mined for what little can be scrounged from its
tacky worthless rubble." - Warwick on Las Vegas



HW
SF
CA

ps: 
For what it's worth, I've had enough of this Empire. I'm moving to Toronto,
Canada in the summer. I will miss San Francisco, especially on days like today...