America excerpts | Joe Davey Animation

'America' excerpts

'America' is very dense with observations on all aspects of American culture, landscape and history. I am making selective notes on certain quotes that may jump out as visual cues, so I can distill down the broad themes for my graphic art.

1. Vanishing Point

Baudrillard experiences the stark weirdness of the vast, timeless desert landscape, juxtaposed with the transient sights of modern America.

'Nostalgia born of the immensity of the Texan hills and the sierras of New Mexico: gliding down the freeway, smash hits on the Chrysler stereo. heat wave.'

'magic of the freeways'

'fascination of senseless repetition.... in the abstraction of the journey'

Salt Lake City

'pompous Mormon symmetry'/'Los-Angelic modernity'/'religion as special effects'

Great Salt Lake Desert - 'absolute horizontality'/'whiter than snow, flatter than the sea'

Monument Valley/Dead Horse Point/Grand Canyon

'Geological - and hence metaphysical - monumentality, by contrast with the physical altitude of ordinary landscapes'

'the surrealist qualities of an ocean bed in the open air'

'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.'

* 'l'Amérique sidérale: 'astral' or 'sidereal'

'Speed is the triumph of effect over cause, the triumph of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of the surface and pure objectality over the profundity of desire.'

'Triumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated, amnesic intoxication. The superficiality and reversibility of a pure object in the pure geometry of the desert.'

'A desert where the miracle of the car, of ice and whisky is daily re-enacted: a marvel of easy living mixed with the fatality of the desert. A miracle of obscenity that is genuinely American: a miracle of total availability...'

'It takes this surreality of the elements to eliminate nature's picturesque qualities, just as it takes the metaphysics of speed to eliminate the natural picturesqueness of travel.'

'Nothing is further from pure travelling than tourism or holiday travel. That is why it is best done in the extensive banality of deserts, or in the equally desert-like banality of a metropolis - not at any stage regarded as places of pleasure or culture, but seen televisually as scenery, as scenarios.'

'best done in extreme heat... the heat contributes to a barely perceptible evaporation of meaning'

'sheer distance, deliverance from the social'

'Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces...'

'how far can we go in the extermination of meaning...?'

2. New York

Baudrillard paints a portrait of the great metropolis.

'I jump with cat-like tread from one airport to the other'

'the steepling gentleness of skyscrapers'

Minneapolis - 'at the horizon of the inhabited world'

'Planes pass overhead, silent as the wind, behind the windowpanes of the hotel, and the first neon signs begin to roll slowly, above the city. What an amazing place America is!'

'the city that is heir to all other cities at once. Heir to Athens, Alexandria, Persepolis: New York.'

'More sirens here, day and night. The cars are faster, the advertisements more aggressive. This is is wall-to-wall prostitution. And total electric light too. And the game - all games - gets more intense. It's always like this when you're getting near the centre of the world.'

'City of Pharaohs, all obelisks and needles.'

'Why do people live in New York? There is no relationship between them. Except for an inner electricity which results from the simple fact of their being crowded together.'

'...this is the gentle hell of the Roman Empire in its decline'

'Nothing could be more intense, electrifying, turbulent, and vital than the streets of New York.'

'There are millions of people in the streets, wandering, carefree, violent, as if they had nothing better to do than produce the permanent scenario of the city.'

'the neat, spacious geometry of the city is far removed from the thronging intimacy of the narrow streets of Europe'

'always turbulent, lively, kinetic, and cinematic, like the country itself'

'Such is the whirl of the city, so great its centrifugal force, that it would take superhuman strength to envisage living as a couple and sharing someone else's life in New York.'

'In New York, the mad have been set free.'

I Did It!

'The moon landing is the same kind of thing: 'We did it!''

'Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance'

Mystic Transportation Incorporated

'Every special effect can be found here, from sublime verticality to decay on the ground...'

'It has to be said that New York and Los Angeles are at the centre of the world, even if we find the idea both exciting and disenchanting.'

'concrete mythology'

'It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.'

3. Astral America

Baudrillard's philosophical overview of America.

'Star-blasted, horizontally by the car, altitudinally by the plane, electronically by television, geologically by deserts...'

'For me there is no truth of America'

'the latest fast-food outlet, the most banal suburb, the blandest of giant American cars or the most insignificant cartoon-strip majorette is more at the centre of the world than any of the cultural manifestations of old Europe.'

'Everything disappears before that desert vision'

'America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality'.

'America is a giant hologram, in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements. Take the tiniest little place in the desert, any old street in a Midwestern town, a parking lot, a Californian house, a Burger King or a Studebaker, and you have the whole of the US - South, North, East, or West.'

'From the visual and plastic viewpoints too: things seem to be made of a more unreal substance; they seem to turn and move in a void as if by a special lighting effect, a fine membrane you pass through without noticing it. This is obviously true of the desert. It is also the case with Las Vegas and advertising, and even the activities of the people, public relations, and everyday electronics all stand out with the plasticity and simplicity of a beam of light'.

'All dwellings have something of the grave about them, but here the fake serenity is complete.'

'like drips in an intensive care ward, the TV, stereo, and video which provide communication with the beyond, the car (or cars) that connect one up to that great shoppers' funeral parlour, the supermarket...'

'The microwave, the waster disposal, the orgasmic elasticity of the carpets: this soft, resort-style civilisation irresistibly evokes the end of the world.'