Note 13 - Page 28 - Baudrillard
“Sylvère, who’s typing this, says this letter lacks a point. What reaction am I looking for? He thinks this letter is too literary, too Baudrillardian. He says I’m squashing out all the trembly little things he found so touching. It’s not the Dumb Cunt Exegesis he expected. “
- Pg. 28
The Chance Event
The Chance Event: Three Days in the Desert: Primm, Nevada, November 1996. Curated by Chris Kraus, Chance brought together Jean Baudrillard, Rosanne Alluquere Stone, DJ Spooky, Diane di Prima, the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, visual artists, garage noise bands and 600 participants to investigate the mystery of chance at Whiskey Pete's Casino. Variously described as "a philosophy rave" and "one of the landmark LA events of the 90s," The Chance Event was reviewed on the front page of the LA Times and throughout the art press. Highlights, including a performance by Baudrillard wearing a gold Elvis-inspired blazer and accompanied by the 'Chance' band, were broadcast on European television. The event was funded by the French Cultural Service and Art Center College of Design.
CHRIS KRAUS ON BAUDRILLARD - SEMIOTEXT(E)
At The Chance Event at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in Primm, Nevada, November 1996, 400 people lay on the floor at 2 in the morning to hear Jean Baudrillard deliver a lecture on the Demise of the Real. Because of the drugs, the lateness of hour, Jean’s heavy French accent, the bad last-minute translation and the fact that few of us were trained as philosophers, the people assembled at best heard every fifth word. The response was ecstatic. Jean was wearing a gold lame Liberace suit, and though he was a reluctant guru, he was willing to accept what the audience gave him: a pure, undiluted unconditional love. Think, Johnny Cash performing at Folsom Prison. (We were prisoners of our highly evolved senses of irony.) The Santa Claus factor. Baudrillard was – like William S. Burroughs at the end of his life – one of those rare public figures whose presence conveys a promise of happiness beyond any literal content, beyond any hype. His books were written in aphorisms — the kind of texts where every page is marked with a Post-It, every sentence is underlined. For his last public appearances in New York in November, 2005, hundreds of young people lined up in the streets outside his venues. It was clear that they’d come not just to hear his (breathtaking) lecture on Abu Ghraib, but to be able to say years later: they’d been there, they’d heard Jean Baudrillard. Modest, independent, and devastatingly humorous, Jean’s work transmitted the lost urbanity of the mid-20th century while speaking of and into the future. His writings described the present with breathtaking accuracy without ever becoming programmatic. No wonder fans gathered around him. Cheerfully nihilistic, Baudrillard’s work gave us ways our own vague perceptions could become something larger, systemic and totally crystalline.
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