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 plunging
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.
Baudrillard,
Excerpts from America
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.
Baudrillard,
Excerpts from America
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 disappearance.
Baudrillard,
Excerpts from America
Caution:
Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear!
Baudrillard,
Excerpts from America