Book 63 - Jean Baudrillard "The Evil Demon Of Images"

Jean Baudrillard "The Evil Demon Of Images" (Power Publications)


A very short book which is a   transcript of a lecture he did in Australia. In it the French theorist delivers his thoughts on film, TV and the image. It also includes an extended interview where he expounds his notion of objective irony, seduction and hyperreality. A difficult but thought provoking read about the relation of the mass media to the postmodern.

Marco Polo

Murky rain soaked day, A day for staying in except that I had to go to Sittingbourne this morning.

I returned an hour after midday, and whilst cousin put on some indie music downstairs, I decided to dug out my DVD of Claude Vivier’s “Dreams Of A Marco Polo”, The double DVD contains two short operas , Kopernikus and Marco Polo which is shadow and light treated as a ritualistic succession of musical and dramatic events.



I watched over half of the second DVD (Marco Polo) , and will probably finish it a bit later. I have had this for ages ,and really, this is the first time I have actually got round to watching a substantial section of the DVD.

The Canadian French composer is probably better known for the strange way he died -

On the night of March 8 1983, the 35-year-old French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier was stabbed to death in his Paris apartment. His killer was a male prostitute Vivier had met in a bar earlier that evening. On the worktable was the manuscript of Vivier's final, uncompleted work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? (Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul?), a dramatised monologue in which Vivier describes a journey on the metro during which he becomes attracted to a young man. The music breaks off abruptly following the line: "Then he removed a dagger from his jacket and stabbed me through the heart.

Musically, the opera has that strange sound world which in some respects is similar to the austere avant garde music created by Karlheinz Stockhausen