eohippus        all contents copyright 2007 max carmichael why eohippus?         bio         contact
arts portfolio:         visual arts         music         writing         events         design        
writing:     pamphlet literature back         next
...The newest and tallest building is Buffalo Bill's hotel, a very cheaply constructed but starkly beautiful hotel designed to look exactly like the mill building of a 19th-century mining camp, but on a surrealistically exaggerated scale. And towering over it is the world's tallest and fastest roller coaster - an unavoidable challenge to the lust for going downhill fast which has hit me late in life. Like others of the new generation of rides, its track is designed to look as fragile as a spider's web - really just a pale yellow trace across the pale blue desert sky, soaring transparently above the barren plain and its baked, brutal hills. I knew a transcendent form of terror awaited me on that track. No matter what happened at the conference, I was about to experience something radically, viscerally new. Something which, as I knew from experience, could be as irreversible as your first real acid trip.

...So imagine my surprise when the spotlight opens at the back of the dark stage, a narrow cone of light falling on the back of a woman in a long black dress, and rising slowly, she walks dramatically to the front of the stage, and lighting a candle, proceeds to speak very movingly of her mother's death, and how her mother began to speak in a lost tongue, and I realize from the voice and the body that this person is or was a man somehow, and as she moves with great honesty and directness from this story to another, and another, each story illustrating her theoretical points in the ancient way, the fireside way, with song and dance, comedy and tragedy - I find myself totally in awe of this person who comes to encourage us by example, who by painful experience has come to understand a range of human nature that I didn't think it was possible for one person to comprehend.



1996

In the fall of 1996, Chris Kraus, from the faculty of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, organized the most ambitious and successful contemporary culture-fest I've ever heard of. Jean Beaudrillard was the headliner, accompanied by Sandy Stone, a trans-sexual cyber-visionary performance artist and theorist. The three-day event took place at Whiskey Pete's Casino at Stateline on the way to Las Vegas, surrounded by stark desert mountains and playas.

There were DJ's, bands, lectures, dance performances, readings, art installations, and desert walks, presented by a Pauite Indian leader, a wall street trader, a theoretical mathematician, a magician, and so forth. My book was the only narrative record of the conference, and Chris later bought a bunch of copies to distribute to the speakers.

...For all my irreverence, I have to say that this image will stay with me: a wide casino showroom, darkened, with spots of disco light floating dreamily across its surfaces; a cool trance groove filling the space in between; and Jean Beaudrillard, heir to the throne of French theory, a brief but leonine man dressed in a full-on Elvis jacket with brilliant sequined lapels, softly reciting his debased visions into the matrix.

...Calvin is about my height, a formidable man with his feet squarely on the ground. His people have always lived in the desert. "I've studied what they say about the Bering Straight," he tells me, chuckling lightly. "My people don't believe that. We have our own stories. Why would somebody else try to tell us where we come from? Our stories say we come from this desert, right back here," he gestures over his shoulder. Living in the desert you acquire a sense of theater and spectacle. You can point to your whole world. Without seeming to be purposeful, he leads us just out of sight of the casino, to a spot on the side of a hill looking out over the open desert toward Clark Mountain, toward the pale cliffs that are soaking up the rising sun. It's the spot Pericles would have chosen.